Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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I really disagree with this assessment. First of all, I’ve worked on three mega-budget features with huge teams of people all using Keylight. In the right hands, it works fantastically.
Secondly, Primatte is a decent keyer but it has workflow limitations that Keylight does not, and in my experience Primatte makes for an EASY key, but it doesn’t always give a GOOD key. I saw in your link someone raving that Primatte managed to pull a hard-edged, unrealistic key for someone trying to key out their carpet. While that says a lot about how good it may be for rank amateurs who want a one-click solution, that doesn’t really tell us much in terms of how it performs in professional situations.
In response to the poster’s question, most big-budget shops use Apple Shake or Nuke for their compositing, which allows you to basically build your own keying tool from scratch. Down here on earth, most people use Keylight, Primatte or Ultimatte.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
HD footage from the HVX is encoded in DVCPRO HD format, which is only available on systems with Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere CS3 or Sony Vegas installed. Even then, you may not have it if you did a limited install or something strange.
I am assuming you exported from FCP and moved the footage to a different machine, otherwise you really shouldn’t be getting any errors.
There IS a work around to get the codec on other Macs (PCs may have a similar workaround as well). The DVCPRO HD components required to view and work with this video can be found in the “library>quicktime” folder (or something along those lines) on the mac with FCP. You can copy them (there are 5-6 component files that must be copied) to the machine without FCP and all should be well.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Here is a fully manual way to do it with no plugins or other tools, and can also be done pre-CS3:
Create a 1,500×1,500 pixel comp and call it “ripple” or something like that. within this, create two layers – a black solid that fills the background, and a white solid above it. On the white solid, use the circle mask tool to create a large disk about half the size of the comp. Duplicate the mask, set it to “subtract” mode in the mask settings, and lower the mask expansion to like -60 pixels (adjust to taste). You will end up with a big thick ring. Apply Fast Blur to this “ring” layer, with settings of like 20 or more (adjust to taste). Animate the layer’s scale from 0 to like 300% or something. I would also animate the opacity to fade in at the very beginning of the scale animation so that the ring appears as it scales up.
At this point you have a big, blurred ring that scales up. Pull this “ripple” comp into the comp that holds your footage and hide the ripple layer. Apply “effect>distort>displacement map” to your source footage, and set the ripple comp as the source layer in the displacement settings. You will also need to set the “Use for horizontal/vertical displacement” settings to luminance since we created a black and white animation as the basis for the ripple. You will need to experiment with the Max Displacement settings to get the look you want, and you will also need to go into your ripple comp and adjust things to suit the look you are after.
Seem complicated? There’s probably easier ways but this will give you a lot of control over every aspect of the animation, and you’ll understand how it works. The other, more “feature film” method of doing this is using particle systems to create discs of particles blowing outward, with half of the particles being green and the other half being red. once slightly blurred, this can give you a more gassy, heat-wave style displacement. I would assume it’s also why the displacement map effect defaults to using the red and green channels as the source channels for the displacement.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
The problem is that AE’s buffer can only handle actual images/layers of a certain size, the comp itself can be pretty large without issue. That limitation isn’t reduced by having more hard drive space or more RAM, it’s just life.
The best way to get around this problem is to take your 5Kx5K pixel image into photoshop and split it up into, say, 1,000x,000 pixel chunks, reassembling them within your giant comp. If the layer in question is a solid created in AE, break it up in the same way only within After Effects. If you don’t do this you are going to have a lot of headaches.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
What Joey means by render vs. export is that you can add compositions to the render queue (the correct way) using Composition>Add To Render Queue, or you can use the File>Render option which is not proper. Aside from that clarification, he is correct on how you should approach this – Animation codec, millions of colors+ (the + means it has an alpha channel which holds the transparency info).
Also, you’ll get best results using the “straight” alpha option rather than the default “premultiplied” option. Straight alpha channels look really bad/weird in Quicktime Player, but will come into FCP looking correct.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
DV Widescreen Version:
Create a new, empty comp using the widescreen DV preset. Drag your 1080i comp into this new composition and scale it down to fit. Add this DV widescreen comp to the render queue and proceed as normal.
HDV 1080i version:
It sounds like you might have gone in and gummed up your settings somewhere. Provided that your comp is set to use the correct settings, you shouldn’t have any mismatch issues. Aside from that, I can’t really help on this one.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
IShowU. Can record full screen 1920×1080 29.97 animation codec WITH sound without skipping a beat. As mentioned, at $20 it’s tops.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Lenny Lieberman of Lieberman Productions has made a trillion dollars from this type of arrangement with Guthy Renker. GR pays cost to have the spots/infomercials developed, and Lieberman Prod. gets a cut of the profits.
Of course, this would only be a wise arrangement if the client is reasonably well established and (this is key) willing to pay the full costs of production + profit sharing RATHER THAN expecting a total spec.
Specs are scams 99% of the time, but there are some legitimate and very lucrative profit-sharing/partnership opportunities out there. Spotting the difference is the hard part…
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
The GPU has no bearing on render times. It really only comes into play for doing OpenGL previews on your timeline, and even there it is widely agreed that AE’s OpenGL implementation is sorely lacking.
Between CPU and GPU there is no question, you should focus on CPU. That is only half of the story, however. Both After Effects CS3’s built-in multiprocessor rendering and Nucleo function by silently spawning multiple instances of After Effects in the background, and these instances each render frames until the job is done.
The problem is, each instance of AE will need adequate RAM to really be of any use. AE CS3’s multiprocessor rendering actually requires you to have adequate RAM or it will not allow you to use those extras cores in this way.
It is recommended that you have a minimum of 1GB RAM per CPU core with AE CS3. This means 4-core machines should have no less than 4GB RAM, and ideally more so that the OS has some RAM to work with and 4GB is “left over” for After Effects. In order to access this much memory you need a 64-bit OS (32-bit OS’s only “see” 2-3GB RAM) which means Windows64 or Apple’s OS X.
Really, the ideal setup for AE CS3 is:
– quad-core machine (Windows 64-bit or OS X)
– 8GB RAM
– a decent Nvidia consumer card like the 8600GT
– Three hard drives – a boot drive, a drive for your files/renders and a “cache” drive to point After Effects’ “disc cache” to.The Mac Pros are ideal for this setup, as they are 64-bit, quad-core, have three spare drive bays, hold up to 16GB RAM and come with 2GB standard. It is cheapest to pick up that 6GB additional RAM and spare drives from a third party supplier like Other World Computing, which is Apple certified but 1/3 the cost.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
That is pretty much always done with a 3D package like Maya. You probably could cobble together a similar effect just using After Effects, but it will fall far short of the examples you cited.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com