[Chris Wright]

you could script something in autohotkey or vb. a single button like windows+q would close ae, open previous project, uninstall plugins silently, and do all sorts of funky stuff automatically.

[Chris Wright]

there’s lot of compression options for tiff, I do know from extensive testing that tiff with LZW compression turned off is 100% lossless at trillions of colors. I haven’t directly tested to see which compression is the buggiest though. Plus, try converting your h264 footage to uncompressed before rendering. That will fix codec bugs for sure. And heck, targa/PNG/PSD are also sometimes viable alternatives too.

[Chris Wright]

try turning off opengl before you render. it sometimes makes surprises that don’t show up in a ram preview, only a render.

[Chris Wright]

im sure you could get a good key if you keyed each person separately.
I think you’re trying for the magic slider position which sometimes doesn’t exist for every single pixel in a comp. just garbage matte them individually and do two layers. also there’s matte choker and I tried it with my procedural keyer and got the lady keyed well.

[Chris Wright]

a while back i made a procedural white keyer that uses chroma, luma, and rgb working together with chokes to key stuff keyers can’t

cs5.5 project
https://f1.creativecow.net/6898/bandingwhite-masker

[Chris Wright]

timewarp comes free with AE. You can set its speed to 0 and just enable the shutter blur. It works similar to reelsmart motion blur using optical flow.

[Chris Wright]

use a good keyer as an alpha mask to help support change to color effect.

[Chris Wright]

free ae template remove auto flicker/shadow/white balance

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1038432

[Chris Wright]

4:4:4 is chroma sampling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling

32bpc is levels of brightness
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/917115

“So… 4:4:4 is synonymous with 32 bit color?”
No, you can have 4:4:4 8 bit or 4:4:4 16 bit.
GH2 output is 8bit. if you have a high end field recorder, there’s no point in trying to
capture 16 bpc. it’s like sending a value of 5 from the camera but you’re recording 5.000
but still try to match the 4:2:0 in the recorder. you don’t want to sub-sub sample your pixels!

“So, really, it sounds like I want to stick with 16 bit until final output?”
yes, just watch out for using 8bit effects, they will break the quality.

“Speaking of which, is there a way to look at an effect and know right off the bat if it’s processing in 8 or 16 bits?” Yes, in the effects panel, each effect has a small digit on the left, 8,16,32bpc

“C4d has an 8 bit dither checkbox for output. This should be off if rendering out in 16 bit?”
“”8 Bit Dithering is a process that adds a random pattern to colors to prevent color banding. Although dithering enhances the image quality, it also increases file size. For web graphics in particular, you may want to disable dithering to reduce image file size.As this “noises-up” the colors, the noise will be more prominent in the moment you need some heavy color correction.” So, basically render out of C4D in 16bpc if possible so you can color correct in AE.

also, if you’re exporting to trillions of colors, you are actually outputing 16bpc. Float is 32bpc. millions is 8bit. not all image seqences or codecs support all three. note:AE’s dither is different than C4D.

“Starting to see now why my first dvd experiment looked like a cartoon gone horribly wrong on the burned disc.”

Yes, besides losing a lot of quality in the mpeg2 from 4:2:0, the color profile needs to be color managed as well because dvd’s use rec.709 color management called an icc profile

color manage your monitor
https://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/blog/tag/icc-profiles/

color management in After Effects
https://www.adobe.com/devnet/aftereffects/articles/color_management_workflow.html

“How exactly? What am I looking for?”
you’re looking for crappy looking quality 🙂

for youtube, they have their own recommendations for the type of file you upload.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

for bandwidth issues, I’d definately look into adaptive video streams that can change quality
depending on the user’s connection type. Consider .flv files. they are very small.
but that’s a whole nother can of worms that could fill several books.

[Chris Wright]

sample kodak vision 3 template pics