[Charles Taylor]

Thanks for the tips, Pete.

RE: losing the roto:
Moving over to the keypad every time I mis-click is not really any more fun than mousing over to the layer (and might actually be slightly more work).

RE: accidentally moving things:
I had been wondering why I couldn’t marquee select – I hadn’t pieced together that is was because the roto layer was invisible. Is that a bug? Because I can’t see what functionality that provides. Add not being able to marquee select while doing the thing that makes everything else semi-usable to my list of gripes…
Also, is there a shortcut to lock all layers but the current layer? Because once the roto is in a comp, it’s pretty painful to lock every other layer…

RE: difficulty of switching between moving the whole shape etc:
That’s just the problem. In Shake and Nuke (not that Nuke has stellar roto tools either, but…) you have a persistent transform handle that will move and rotate the shape and that doesn’t interfere with the rest of your work. In Mocha, there is a key that makes your click and drags move the whole shape while it’s pressed.
I was hoping I had missed how to enable something like either of those in AE.

RE: RotoBezier
Is that what that does? I’ll have to check that out. The manual seemed to imply that it did that at creation, but not while working. That would be nice.

RE: too easy to mis-click
Not sure I understood you there – I was talking about the tangent handle specifically. In all the other roto packages I’ve used the point looks like this: 0—0—-0, with the centre 0 being the point on the mask and the out 0’s being the ends of the tangent handle, and only clicking on the 0’s does anything. In AE, you can click on the whole tangent handle, which is a problem since the point itself is so small, it’s easy to misclick. You think you’ve grabbed the point, and find that you’ve flung the tangent handle into the nether regions… That’s another thing – bigger targets for the points (perhaps even a user-definable size, like Shake).

I guess I’m just blown away by the fact that version 9 of a supposedly professional compositing program has such poorly thought-out roto tools. It’s disappointing, really, because the final effect that these rotos are going into is looking really good – it’s just way, way more painful to get the roto done than it should be.

RE: Michael Szalapski’s comment on UI

I’ve only been using AE and PS much since the CS days, and the UI has been changed only cosmetically since then. Both AE and PS still stick with their limited and cumbersome layer-based UI. What people want and need (even if they don’t know it or think they disagree) is a hybrid layer/node based system where the main interaction paradigm is modified mouse clicks and gestures.

[Charles Taylor]

RE: Silhouette:

Unfortunately, buying more software is out for this one, or I would pick up Mocha Shapes for AE, so that we could import shapes from Mocha.

RE: Tutorials

Thanks for the links, but those are really more of “how-to-roto” tutorials, and not how to make roto in AE as comfortable as in some other effects packages. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that, without buying more software, there really just is no solution. Roto in AE is just a waste of time and mental energy.

After another day of trying, we just can’t find a way to make doing roto in AE comfortable, and so will be going the also uncomfortable route of doing our roto in Mocha, and then just importing the mattes generated into AE. Kinda sucks, but is better than what we’ve been doing today and yesterday.

As I think I mentioned before, I think the bug that is getting to us the most at the moment is the fact that if you click off of the roto in the comp window once too many times you end up de-selecting the roto and having to click on it again in the layer window. Gets pretty old, pretty fast. I don’t want to move that layer. I don’t want to select that layer. I want to do my damned roto and get on with my life!

Also, the difficulty of switching between transforming the whole shape vs. one point. And the fact that you can’t decide whether moving a point should move the adjacent tangent handles to smooth the curve or not (Nuke also doesn’t do this right, so at least AE is in good company…). And the click zone for each point is way too small, and it’s way too easy to click on the handle accidentally (because the whole handle and not just the tip is clickable). Basically, just really frustrated by a lot of lousy UI decisions. So many things require a high degree of precision when that’s just completely unnecessary. Sigh.

Michael Coleman has hinted on his blog that there might be some improvements on the roto front in CS5, which would be much appreciated. I’m afraid that they will be of the new feature variety, rather than the refined-user-experience variety, though, which unfortunately seems to be the Adobe motto.

[Charles Taylor]

Thanks for the pointers, guys.

RE: roto-ing in the layer panel:
What I’m doing right now is creating masks in a solid layer that are then applied as an alpha matte to another layer. If I were to try and roto in the layer panel, all I would see is black.

Or are you suggesting that I roto in the layer panel for the footage, and then copy the mask to the solid, and just go back and forth like that?? Because if roto wasn’t already a recipe for headaches, that would be…

RE: online help:
Thanks for the link to the online help, I hadn’t seen that page on roto. The tip to turn off the eye for layers you aren’t using and locking the footage seems like it’s probably as good as it will get, unfortunately. Seems like a cumbersome workaround to do some pretty basic work though…

Any other tips relating specifically to making roto more comfortable in AE? Or, better yet, has anyone made a script that will import .SSF files from Shake rotos? That would be ideal, as our roto people already know Shake. I’ve looked, but haven’t found one…

[Charles Taylor]

Good to know. I’ll track down 2.8.

Thanks for your time.

[Charles Taylor]

Maybe it’s a 2.5.1/2.8 issue.

I’m pretty sure they all import fine, but for any shot that is spanned over cards – EVEN if all the cards are available – it gives errors.

I think it works, regardless of the errors, but I don’t like errors…

[Charles Taylor]

I tried this, and it kicked back an error for many of the .smi files. It seems to pick one .smi to import, and then the rest of the .smi’s from that spanned clip it doesn’t handle nicely.

Any thoughts on this?

[Charles Taylor]

Wow, that’s a bummer. Is it everything over 10bit or is 16bit still ok?

[Charles Taylor]

I thought it was just 10bit out from Shake that was broken on Intel, is it import as well? I seem to recall coming out of Shake as 16bit TIFF, then rendering back to QT in AE.

(I get the feeling I’m making this complicated, but I can’t quite justify replacing Shake until it finally dies completely).

[Charles Taylor]

This is what I’ve tried:

Export QT Movie – to UC 10bit.
Result: Truncated

Export QT Movie – Current Settings
Import to Shake, Render to TIFF
Import to FCP
Result: Truncated

Export QT Movie – Current Settings
Import to AE
Export UC 10bit from AE
Import to FCP
Result: Truncated

What I’m doing now:

Send to Color
Do CC in float
Render to 10bit UC
Import to Shake (It will truncate at this point, but that’s fine, because the CC is done)
Do VFX
Export from Shake
Import to FCP
Go out to tape, DVD, etc.

Any other things to try? I’m thinking that when it goes through Shake, it’s going to be truncated no matter what. Urk.

[Charles Taylor]

That was my understanding (that FW was highest quality for all things DVCPro).