Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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There are several “standard” HD sizes, and you really need to find out from someone what the specs of your project are (maybe ask the editor). Most HD in broadcast TV is 1280x720p, but there is also 1920x1080i. After Effects has composition presets for all standard HD sizes, so you should use them once you know the project specs.
Working in 16bit would be a very good idea, but other than that there isn’t much different than working in standard def. You should know that HD is square pixel, and is either progressive frame (720p) or interlaced (1080i). Interlaced flavors of HD are always upper field.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Well, yeah. I said “color” because it’s really both hue AND saturation that the keyer draws upon. In my mind, hue+saturation=color.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Don’t color correct first!
Keylight is a color difference keyer, meaning that it requires a strong difference between the color of your greenscreen and the color of your foreground element to work. When you color correct, your changes apply to the entire image so you aren’t really enhancing the color differences, just shifting things around – an exercise in futility. The goal is not necessarily a strong green background, but a strong difference between its color and that of the foreground.
Ultimately the biggest obstacle with your footage is the green spill on the motorcycle and stand (since they are metallic), which is surely being affected by your color correction just as much as the background plate.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Heheh, I assumed we were above the water looking in…
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Using the Watch Folder option is quite a pain in my experience, and I doubt the effort would be worth the minimal gains you would experience having one extra laptop rendering your project. Here’s a few reasons why:
1. Since the second render machine is connected to your master via ethernet, you will need gigabit for it to even be worth the effort. Even then, projects with large assets (like uncompressed movie files) will move slowly on the render machine as it pulls data in from the master machine.
2. If you’re like most artists, rendering multiple times (even dozens of times) during a project is par for the course. Given that you have to “collect files” and place them in the watch folder every time you want to render, this adds an extra process you have to go through every time you render.
3. The need to have the same plugins, fonts etc. on both machines is a cost concern. While you can install the AE render node on other machines for free, you can’t legally do that with your plugins or commercial fonts. If you intend to be within the law, the cost could be prohibitive considering what you’d get out of this setup.
4. As Adobe states, you will need to render image sequences for this setup to work, since multiple machines cannot contribute to building a movie file. This adds yet another kink in your workflow (unless you currently render out image sequences) since you will need to build a QT/AVI file from the resulting image sequence. This process alone will likely eat up any speed gains you might get from having this two-machine render setup.
Needless to say this is just my opinion and others may have differing views.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
This YouTube clip is definitely done in a 3D application. I would imagine that it’s a 3d model of the dancer with a texture applied that has an alpha channel, so all you see is the music notes. They appear to have surface-emitting particles throwing out music notes to add to the effect.
You will never get this effect with After Effects alone. You could do the music notes that are flying off of the character using multiple instances of Particular, each with a different music note as the source and with different settings, but the character itself would be near impossible to create in AE.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Usually the sizzle is caused by heavy-handed key settings. This is not to say you are doing anything wrong per se, some greenscreen plates require stronger settings to get everything keyed out. But this is usually a sign of quality problems with the footage – the video’s lighting wasn’t done properly, you are working with DV footage etc.
If it IS a quality issue, your options are more limited. Seeing a frame of your footage without any keying applied would really help in making a recommendation, because different techniques are required for different situations.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
If you are wanting to view the original greenscreen plate and the end result side by side, you can precompose the greenscreen shot and apply Keylight to the precomp.
You don’t want to use the 2-view setting, you need to twirl down the arrow next to the composition name in the comp viewer, and there is an option to open comp in new viewer. Using this method, you can have two different comps open side by side – the comp containing your original greenscreen plate open in one, and the comp holding your greenscreen precomp that you are applying keylight to.
There are probably other/better ways to do this, but it’s one way to get the job done.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
There are several effects caused by looking through a body of water, but refraction and caustics are the primary things you would want to mimic. Refraction causes objects underwater to appear distorted, while caustics is more responsible for the focused highlights you see.
Jim Tierny wrote a thorough and very comprehensive tutorial on creating these effects, right here on the Cow:
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
What are your system specs, and what is going on in your project? How many layers? What types of files included? are you using any very large images, etc?
Sorry, I know it’s annoying but this is all info we will need to accurately troubleshoot.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com