[Chris Wright]

“I’ve had some success playing with contrast and using soften
filters.”

This sounds like you are looking for a polygonal look. Tweak some cartoon plugins listed here. https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/50/856947#856947

Also, I don’t know how much you want real actors to move, fluid? Are they shot at the same fps as the cgi? Twixtor them out same framerate or you could try posterize effect 2 or 3 less fps then they were actually shot at. It would be very subtle, but interesting.
Finally, color correction and matching shadows helps a lot too.

[Chris Wright]

actually you can,

channels-arithmetic
. operator add
. clipping on – Clip result values leaving all rgb values at floor 0.

I sometimes merge 16 and 32 comps together and use this to remove bleeding artifacts.

I often set it as an adjustment layer in mode saturation to clip protect my projects.

[Chris Wright]

if you’re just tracking and not messing with roto, you can go to tracker option and select “track fields”. That will make it more stable. Another way to do this is…

example:
[
1. drop a 29.97 interlaced into a 59.94 composition.
You can now track precision-wise down to field level. This reduces jumps in tracking, roto.

2. drop roto comp back into 29.97 comp. turn on Field Render in the Render Settings. ]
—
You also want sub-pixel positioning on
and decide between rgb and luminance tracking, test each.
Drag outer box bigger. It will take longer to track but will be 10x more accurate.

[Chris Wright]

right click-replace footage placeholder, no dragging needed.

[Chris Wright]

to make yours look perfect, add a fake radial blur

1. amount 300
center 360,240
type zoom
antialiasing best quality high

It will make it almost as sharp and clean as a vector image.

[Chris Wright]

another thing you could do since exposure and levels are 32bpc effects, set project settings to 32bpc and keep it lazy and push/pull pixels and the image won’t lose quality because the information will still be there, just invisible in case you want it back.

[Chris Wright]

There’s no problem, you can simply paste the old .aex filters into the new AE. Some plugins are separate installs on the disk too.

[Chris Wright]

Now don’t be tempted to download the Primatte demo.
CLICK HERE
https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/downloads/trial-versions/
CLICK HERE

btw Algolith deinterlacer is 99.9% quality for deinterlacing.
Magic Bullet’s isn’t bad either.

[Chris Wright]

Twixtor’s built in deinterlacer is no better than AE’s. Revision says so. They recommend fieldskit for deinterlacing.

I believe the keyers can work with separated fields because that is how they are programmed. If you try to key individual fields, the keys don’t seem to work as well. The same with deinterlacing plugins. Don’t ask me, ask the programmers.

The thing you should focus on is de-artifacting, the compression of dv color loss that gets reconstructed. It’s built into Primatte and Magic Bullet. It helps key 10x better. Not to mention not using dv cameras in the first place, lol.

[Chris Wright]

example:

1. drop a 29.97 interlaced into a 59.94 composition.
You can now track precision-wise down to field level. This reduces jumps in tracking, roto.

2. drop roto comp back into 29.97 comp. turn on Field Render in the Render Settings. Done!

The reason why chatter is reduced is because if you didn’t track field level, you’d be working in a “deinterlaced footage” window with roto work that is interpolated by AE. ewww…