Chris Smith
Forum Replies Created
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This is a standard tool used all the time in film transfer called “Power Windows” all commercials and music videos use them for subtle effect that you don’t directly notice, but a lot of the times (like in this Yamaha spot) they are used dramatically for sky darkening. A power window is a feathered shape that gives the DaVinci another layer of color correction within that shape. In final transfer, we will often use up to 15 power windows in one shot!
So I have created simple power window nodes in Shake, but in AE, it’ll need a little more work.
What a power window truly does is give you additional color correction control whithin a shape so here’s how it would be done in AE:
Have your base footage layer. Color correct it however you wish. Since AE doesn’t have any “good” color correction tools for video internally let’s just say it’s “Curves” that did all the tweaking.
Now to make it true Davinci power windows, we would need an AE tool called “Compound Curves” which would only have the curves effect work on where we gave it a mask (like SHake has on every node!). But it don’t. So we will have to be inconvenienced a bit and copy the footage layer with the curves on it. In the Duplicate (Which should be on the top layer) Create a feathered mask shape. Let’s make it the mask that will “Protect” the color correction you have. So if it is a shot of a guy on a dirt bike, draw an oval around the guy. Now feather the mask heavily (like 100 or so). But you will not see a change because you have masked something over a copy of itself.
Now for the magic. Go back to the bottom layer (your original) and go into the curves and drop the RGB gamma and crush in the blacks a little. Viola! Your sky and surrounding area just darkened. But better yet you have full control. Use the same curves to tweak it’s color or do whatever you wish.
In this scenario we had to copy the color correction and modify it to see a change. However in a real DaVinci or in the Shake node, all you have to do on the second layer of correction is just offset what you want different from zero (no correction). Where as here we are offsetting from the full correction.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
You are having the standard problem of converting from YUV to RGB to YUV.
FCP defaults to working in YUV space when working with a YUV codec like DV.
AE is 100% RGB internally. So a conversion must be made. Unfortunately, YUV and RGB use color space a little bit differently. RGB considers black to white to be 0 to 255. YUV considers it to be 16 to 235. Above and below 16 and 235 are “Super White” and “Super Black” and are buffer zones.So say you have some thing in FCP that is black. It sits at 16 in YUV color space. FCP makes it look black. Bring that into AE. Now it’s not really black, it’s slightly lighter than black because AE sees black as 0. Then when you save back out to DV. AE compresses the RGB spectrum to fit into the YUV space making your light black even lighter. By time you get this back into FCP, your contrast has dropped a bit.
There are a few things you could do. You could use levels to fix the luminance in AE to RGB. So you would add a levels to your overall footage. Make sure levels is showing value and not percent. Put the black at 16 and the whites at 235. Which will expand the color space to fit RGB.
Or you can save to an RGB codec like Animation and set FCP timeline settings to Always use RGB instead of YUV.
But I may add that using DV as a intermediate codec is a very bad idea. It just recompresses repeatedly. So use a lossy codec to trnsfer to and from AE like Animation at best settings. Plus if you want to keep an alpha channel, Animation codec supports one when using millions of colors+. DV does not support an Alpha channel.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
There are a few compositing books that you can buy with short test clips to use. There is the Shake3 book from Apple and the “Art of digital compositing”.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
You could get a “similar” effect using 3D stroke by trapcode. You could use Forge Freeform as mentioned above. You could map a strip jumping from flat plane to flat plane that are bent in 3d space which will look hard on the edges and not curved though.
Or for $100 Maxon sells Cinema 4D ver 6 called Cinema 4D CE.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
I agree it was 3D and not 3D stroke. Because of the shape of the ends of the lines and also because they are bending in true 3D space and not on 2d flat planes in 3D space.
Another approach is to simply create the lines in 3d space using stripes on a bent piece of geoetry. Then render out a camera moving down the “line”.
Render these stripes out one at a time on 4 different layers.
Then in AE add a linear wipe to each layer set to vertical and about 50%. At this point the camera move itself will do all the work making the stripes look like they are being grown as you move by them.
Then add a slow wiggler to the linear wipe percent so it looks like they gain ground on the camera move and slow down from the cam move. Do this with different settings for each stripe so they look like they are “racing” and growing at different rates.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Rory: Thx for the link. I actually installed my elements in the correct order. I did see that link when searchng for a problem. I then re installed everything from scratch in the order it asked for and I still get the problems.
Ron: I gotcha. I send them a note.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Use compound blur. Put the mask on a white solid. Precomp it so it rasterizes it. Then use that precomp as the compound blur map.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
After installing tiger, QT 7.0.1., and the Decklink drivers 4.8, It now acts oddly and works intermittently. My AE output to it will work fine, then at another time won’t work at all. Then I’ll get ‘general error’ when opening FCP. Now it won’t play out legacy QT through the monitors (like when you play a BM codec movie in the QT player).
It can be solved by (not restarting) shutting down the host comp (i guess it needs to kill the power to the Decklink for a sec). But still odd.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
been using it on Tiger for two weeks now. No probs at all. However my decklink drivers are another story 🙂
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Adam, when I do an object ID pass and marry that with the original RGB image, I get a double anti-aliasing (because the Object ID is AA’s and the RGB image is as well) so I get black fringing in the comp.
I’ve been doing the RGB renders as straight alpha then overiding the alpha in AE with the Object ID. Is this the standard way or is there an easier solution?
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com