[Brett Harding]

Thanks David, that makes sense. I was hoping for something like an expression that would tie the choke value to the pixel alpha/luma value in the matte, but couldn’t figure out a script that would look at each pixel in the layer discreetly.

i.e. if the alpha at a given pixel is .5 the choke effect would be 50%. If it’s .75 ten pixels up, then that pixel is 75% of the effect and so on.

[Brett Harding]

Grow meaning go from choked to un-choked. Thin to thick. Effect-on to effect-off. But asymmetrically across the text so it if the word were “WORD”, then ‘w’ would start unchoking first, then ‘O’, then ‘R’, then ‘D’, but the thickness should also grow across the letters from one side to the other, not just one character at a time, so I would rather stay away from animating the per character stroke property in the text.

The way I’ve been trying to do it is building a matte with a ramp inside a pre comp, animated laterally with the position property. This is placed above an adjustment layer that is luma matted to it. This doesn’t work because the adjustment layer opacity is what is being controlled by the pre comp, not the intensity of the effect on the adjustment layer, so instead of getting varying width of choke, I get varying opacity of effect layer, effectively mixing between full choke and no choke across the area of the ramp.

Let me know if there’s anything else I can be more specific about. Thank you!

[Brett Harding]

Premultiplied (assuming you are referring to “Color” setting under Video Output in the Output Module Settings).

Under Interpret Footage, Alpha options are grayed out.

[Brett Harding]

Quick update: after reading about the many issues with AE masking, I replaced the mask with a shape layer matte and added gaussian blur. This confirms that my problem now lies with the masking. With the shape/blur fix, it looks better, but still substandard (not at all like the display in the comp).

I will keep reading, but if you have any info or know of other threads you can point me to that would be very appreciated. Thanks.

[Brett Harding]

I reset the interpret footage settings to all be “Over Range” and did a render test with the same settings on my test dpx. Voila, this worked (bringing back into AE, it looks exactly the same, with and without LUT, as the source).

However… I went back to the layered comp and did the same thing. Bringing the dpx back in produced the same error. I am now noticing that the error is NOT the same on every layer. I am working with two layers, both are masked, but one is heavily feathered. The un-feathered layer is exactly the same pixel color values – no issue here. The feathered layer is mushy and crushed. Is this a result of the masking? Is there any way around this?

[Brett Harding]

Do you see the same issue if you simply render/re-import the DPX files, untouched? Do your Cineon/DPX settings in the output module match what you’re expecting to input, or are you inadvertently altering them there in the output module?

Yes. I just did another test, this time by taking the source dpx, pulling it into a new comp to maintain source settings, and rendered untouched (setting Output Module to DPX/Cineon and leaving color management as “Working Space – None”. No other settings are changed)

Bringing this dpx back into AE produced a slightly different result: the image is now brighter, rather than darker, than the original source media.

[Brett Harding]

Thanks for the in depth response, but to be clear, the problem is happening before QT render.

Let me try again:

1. comping with DPXs under LUT
2. rendering to DPXs without LUT
3. importing rendered DPXs back into AE and viewing under LUT

Step 3 is where the difference between the comp and the render are apparent.

[Brett Harding]

I am bringing it back into AE after rendering.

[Brett Harding]

Ok, so I did that and I got an error message at the end of the Collect process that read: “error with file:…..” and listed the file path. I moved that file to a different point in the directory and tried the collect again. This time it worked! For some reason one file was putting a flaw in the system…

Thanks for helping me work through this.

[Brett Harding]

I just collected a different project and had no problems – media, project and report all were generated. Wish I had done this earlier. Before I trash my prefs, is there a way to trouble shoot the particular project for this issue?