Barend Onneweer
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I actually place each image sequence in its own folder… Keeps it nice and tidy and it helps with these kinds of situations.
Bar3nd
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There isn’t a big difference in PAL.
The RGB to YUV conversion isn’t a very big deal. The step that causes the biggest hit on image quality is the actual DV compression where the chroma is downsampled to quarter resolution. And unless you decide on a different finishing format than DV, you’ll still need to do that.
If you are planning on finishing on DVD, you could avoid rendering back to DV and go straight to DVD.
Bar3nd
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Nope, it doesn’t come with Color Finesse…
Bar3nd
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Or to avoid AE rendering the color correction on every still again and again, you could do a batch in Photoshop using AutoLevels. It should get you a decent starting point and it hardly takes any of your time.
Bar3nd
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What you’re seeing is the dramatic loss of image resolution due to the DV compression. Basically the color information is subsamled to very low resolution (one quarter of the video res!).
Unfortunately, chromakeying relies heavily on that color information to pull its mattes.
There are a couple of tools out there that attempt to reconstruct the image detail from the pixellated footage. The Magic Bullet Suite has a very good de-artifactor which does a great job. But it comes at a price.
The cheapest option is to smooth out the color information a bit:
1. place the source footage in a comp named “chroma smooth” or something.
2. place an adjustment layer on top of the source and apply a 4 pixel blur.
3. set the blend mode of the adjustment layer to ‘color’.
4. drop the “chroma smooth” comp in a new comp and apply Keylight there.
You’ve effectively smoothed out the colors a bit, while leaving the luminance intact. Not the most high-tec solution, but it’ll do the trick.
Bar3nd
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After Effects doesn’t have one. Actually, most compositing tools don’t have one. I think Steve Wright (it’s his book you’re referring to) uses Cineon most of the time, which does have a Slice tool I think. But neither Shake nor Digital Fusion come with a Slice tool out of the box.
But Synthetic Aperture offers a very versatile toolbox called Test Gear, which does have one: https://www.synthetic-ap.com/products/tg/index.html
95 bucks if you buy it online.
Bar3nd
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Well, it depends on many things. If you’re using the DV codec it could be the chroma subsampling you’re seeing.
If the source video doesn’t look pixellated, it could also be the up-rezzing in the huge screen. NTSC video just doesn’t look very good on large screens… Especially if the upscaling technology isn’t very advanced.
Bar3nd
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Is the Color Management in Photoshop enabled?
AE doesn’t have any Color Management, and if it’s enabled in PS, you’ll see a difference.
Bar3nd
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Two things:
If you crop video to 720×365 (I’d pick an even number if I were you though!), and then place it back into an NTSC composition and render out, you’ll end up with exactly the same video. Whether it’s black because of the overlayed bars, or because of the visible background, makes no difference in this case. MPEG2 (DVD compression) doesn’t support transparency. Black is black.
Another thing. Anamorphic Widescreen for DVD means a 16:9 image squeezed into a 4:3 frame. So you’ll need to scale the video to fill the frame.
In short: there’s no need for doing what you propose: “replacing the black bars with empty pixels”. Also, it won’t result in an anamorpic widescreen DVD.
Bar3nd
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You can just drop you original footage into a DV Widescreen comp (with DV widescreen pixel aspect ratio).
Scale up the source footage to fit in the new widescreen comp, to where it fills the width and crops the black bars.
Render and make sure you set the appropriate anamorphic settings in the DVD authoring menu.
You’ll lose a bit of sharpness due to the blow-op, but other than that you’ll be fine. If you have a bit of budget you could take a look at ReSizer which comes as part of the Anarchy Toolbox, (www.digitalanarchy.com).
It offers a choice of multiple algorithms for scaling footage, some of them better than AE’s internal scaling.
Bar3nd