Brian Berneker
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks Dave,
I don’t have any problems getting the footage into AE. I’m just looking for a more streamlined workflow for capture, rather than HAVING to use FCP to capture the footage all the time.
I am considering moving over to the bundled Premiere, but have more or less been keeping the basic editing to FCP for industry standard compatibility. I have a nice script from Popcorn Island that imports and exports EDLs to and from FCP, so I’m not out of the loop that way… it just seems that FCP is a bit of a large app to run just so I can grab a clip.
Does anybody know about any free or inexpensive HD capture utilities that will read the Vixia? I know quicktime sees it, but it only gives me SD res. If Quicktime was able to capture at full HDV res, then I would be set.
Brian
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Yes, of course most notebooks have a key for toggling some keys on the keyboard back and forth into the numeric keypad, but then you get into overlap on those keys that have other functions when they’re not as numbers… like I said before.. it gets unwieldly..
Of course, it does answer the original question… how to do it…
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Not a bad tutorial. It went through quickly enough without leaving anything out. Could have used a different clip for the second effect, since this one really didn’t give the same feel…
Brian
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Man, I don’t know where to start…. if your using AE CS3, I’d say ditch primatte and use Keylight. Nothing against primatte – I honestly don’t know it that well, but Keylight has been the best keyer I’ve ever seen and it comes standard with AE CS3.
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Remember you don’t have to track specifically on the monitor. You can track on anything in the scene that moves the same as the monitor, even objects that are not affected by the arms.
For track points that are partially obscured over the duration of the scene, you should check out Andrew Kramer’s set extensions tutorial at videocopilot.net to see how to do a tracker from multiple tracker points using null objects.
Get comfortable with Null objects and parenting. It might seem overly technical at first but nulls are very powerful for tons and tons of reasons, not the least of which is motion tracking.
Also, if you use the corner pin tool, the same thing applies. You can put the tracker in one position, but the actual corner node elsewhere relative to it. Obviously you want a stationary camera POSITION but you should be able to pull it off.
Brian
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Yeah or just keyframe a mask and put a black solid behind it. These shots don’t look very long, so it wouldn’t take too much except maybe for hair edges. You could isolate the hair edges with a duplicate layer then and keylight the white. Mask-protect the interior portions that are close to white that you want to leave unaffected.
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Hey even just use still photos and mask them in AE or close crop them in photoshop. You can do tons in AE with the pieces, and use a bit of the puppet tool for good measure. There are a million ways you can do it…
Put the potato in front of your other objects – legs, arms, head, and just scale or slide each body part out of the potato. You can make little black circles grow on the sides of the potato for holes where the parts pop out of.
I recently did a clip with a friend popping out of a jack-in-the -box. I had him masked on green screen, used a mask to cut his lower body off (below his sweater) and added a spring that I would bend using AE’s Bend effect. Manually tracked some clown hair and nose onto him, and used the puppet tool to place a clown suit texture onto his otherwise plain coloured sweater. This whole pre-comp was then popped out of the box using scaling and keyframes.
With a little imagination you can do the same with pretty much any part that you want to grow out of the potato.
Brian
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Yeah, you might want to try some curves in addition to levels (on a table masked adjustment layer). Also, try de-saturating with hue/saturation – sometimes making it true neutral looks like a cleaner white, which might help sell the effect without going pure white.
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I’d say get one of the new brushed metal keyboards (my favorite) and just run external. You could go out of your way setting up new hot keys or learning to use the menus, but that will just take away from the usability of After Effects.
You can also just buy an external num pad as well, which is smaller. There is an article on how to make sure it works here:
https://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080310030635237
Personally I’d just use the notebook for photoshop and other out and about activities, but save my AE work for times when I can sit in front of a big screen.. my 46″ 1920×1080 Toshiba.. Effects just seem more meaningful on a big screen to me, and enhance creativity.
You could set up a workstation to plug in to a full keyboard and monitor… I guess I’m getting way off topic by now…
Brian
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You will have to stabilize the motion to a fixed point, for example the vanishing point would be a good spot. After that, you could probably mask the first portion of trees going out so that you have an overlap point. I think the road would settle for a cross dissolve, but a feathered mask might work.
Basically you want to do one complete cycle with a mask at the start and place it in a comp. Roll the timeline down near the end, and have a second instance of the comp that matches up with your masks and road position, then a third instance going back in time to make up the parts missing from the first mask. Set your in and out points to one look cycle and you should be ok.
Of course there will be no way of getting around the sky and any earth horizon, because they HAVE to shrink/grow in the distance. If the shot is high enough, looking down so as to have no sky showing, that should do away with that problem.
I did a simiar scene with artificial trees and road using trapcode particular. I was able to have a bus (actual footage) driving on a highway across a joshua-treed desert. Only thing was I had to gradually scale the sky and mountains down to create the distance. With a tilted down shot, you could probably do it though.
I’d love to see some of the footage or a few stills to comment more.