[Barend Onneweer]

It’s not the matte – it’s the spill supression in Keylight at work.

Usually you can get it to dissapear by tweaking the supression a little – but you can also remove the supression stage by changing the output of Keylight to (I think, I’m not at my machine right now) ‘Intermediate’ instead of ‘Final Output’ in the dropdown menu.

You may then need to use other means of removing the spill by either using a 3rd party spill killer or doing some colour correction.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Depending on the details of the project, could you set it up so all the orbs are animated in one composition – which would then be placed on top of your ‘floor’ layer?

If you do this, you can set the ‘orb’ layer as a matte for the floor layer.

From what I can tell of your screenshot it could work like this:

You animate all your orbs in comp “Orb Animation”.

You place “Orb Animation” on top of your floor layer.

Duplicate the “Orb Animation” layer and use it as an alpha track matte for the floor layer. This layer is automatically to invisible – but it’s alpha is now transferred to the layer below.

Now your floor layer is only visible where the orbs are – so they might be obscured by the top orb layer. You’ll want to expand and blur the track matte. One way to do that is add an ‘outer glow’ layer style to it.

Hope this helps,

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

You can’t just parent a mask to anything (other than through elaborate scripting) but you can parent the layer that the mask is on.

But if you explain what you’re trying to do with the mask – we might come up with a better solution.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

For the growing and fading circles you could use the ‘Radio Waves’ effect. Then put the plane in 3D and match the perspective like Ted says.

For the rays Trapcode Shine would indeed be the choice.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

It works when all the source material is in the place that the script expects it to be. But when I get an xml from an editor that organized his source material into a different folder structure than I have it – usually the script doesn’t find all the sources. Instead of creating placeholders, it leaves gaps.

Premiere will offline the clip allowing me to manually relink to the footage.

Another example: if the editor used quicktime proxies of Red footage. If I don’t have the proxies the script will produce an empty timeline, whereas Premiere will let me replace the clips for the R3D files.

But the script was definitely very useful to me before Premiere could import FCP xmls.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Actually even well-lit 5D footage benefits from a denoising pass using Neat Video. Partly for the noise from the chip, but more to remove a lot of compression artefacts. I’m working on a feature film that was shot beautifully, mostly on a 5D, and Neat Video is really effective in cleaning up the material without losing any detail. The resulting image leaves a lot more potential for color grading.

As a matter of fact I often end up denoising Red footage if I’m doing chromakeying.

Neat Video is pretty amazing, especially for its price.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

It sort of works. But if it can’t find the source footage it doesn’t put any placeholders in the timeline.

If you have Adobe Premiere Pro, you can import FCP xml projects into Premiere and then import the Premiere project into After Effects. More flexible and more control.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

In theory you’re right. But personally I find the AE colour management and proofing to be a bit untransparent.

If you want to view your material in Rec709, why not just switch the Dreamcolor to Rec709?

On another note, your workflow has two stages of compression: you compress to Prores twice. Maybe for your web-purposes it’s no big deal but I would normally avoid that.

What I do myself if I have to work with 5D material is import the H264 directly into After Effects, do chroma-reconstruction using the DeArtifter that’s in the Red Giant Key Correct plugin-bundle and then apply Neat Video for noise treatment. And then render.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Besides the dreaded Quicktime gamma bug, it could also be Photoshop color management.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Personally I prefer to animate masks in the Layer Window instead of the Comp Window, and having them side-by-side. You can’t move the layer accidentally. But more importantly:

I disable the visibility of masks in the Comp Window so I can see an uncluttered edges, to see how the masked foreground behaves against the background.

And by disabling ‘render’ in the Layer Window while masking I can see the entire image – not just what’s within the mask. I prefer masking that way, to judge where the edges are. But because the Comp Window is open also can still see the final result.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects