[Chris Zwar]

And to add to Adolfo’s information, clicking in the info palette will cycle you through different display options, eg. 0-255, 0-100%, RGB, HSL. So if you suddenly see your values as either a percentage or a HSL value then just keep clicking on the info palette until you get back where you wanted.

-Chris

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

Ha! I agree and admire your wording. They really are completely different tools, and both are easy to over-use.

Personally, I use Knoll Light Factory a lot more than Shine, and I went through a period of putting chroma-hoops in everything. I’m over that now… But it isn’t one or the other. If you have a tight budget and can only afford one, then go for KLF because After Effects already has a few light burst plug-ins which aren’t as fast or pretty as Shine, but do basically the same thing. However although AE also has a lens-flare plug-in, it’s nothing compared to what KLF can do.

-Chris

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

This question was asked on the Media-Motion After Effects email list and was answered by an Adobe employee. I don’t think they’d mind me pasting the response here:

“Hold down Shift when bringing up the prefs via the menu command, and an
extra “Secret” panel is available.

The “purge every N frames” option should slow down your renders, as all
caches are blown, but sometimes it is actually helpful. The reason it isn’t
an official feature is that we consider it a bug if using that option is
helping you. Please let us know via the bug report web form on Adobe.com:

https://www.adobe.com/misc/bugreport.html

We may need your specific project to reproduce the problem, so please
provide real contact info.

Thanks,
DaveS”

So there you go.

-Chris Zwar

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

Firstly, for the sake of discussion, I have 2 3rd party degrainers. There’s one which comes with Pinnacle’s Composite Wizard, which basically checks a series of frames and averages them together if they’re similar enough. This is called temporal filtering, because it works with sequences of frames over time. Although the Pinnacle one is very useful, it can be harsh and I only use it with very subtle settings. It can also introduce artefacts in footage with fast motion, although with talking heads in front of a bluescreen this is not a problem and it can be very effective. It’s very quick too.

I also have Tinderbox 1, which has a degrain filter that doesn’t work across several frames (it’s a spacial filter), only 1 frame at a time. The manual says it is based on a median filter, so I assume it looks at a group of pixels which surround each other and looks for pixels which fall outside the calculated average range. I’ve hardly used it, and once again it can do weird things to footage but in this case not with fast movement but fine details.

Finally, since AE 6.5 the great folks at Adobe have included a filter simply named “Remove Grain”, which you’ll find under the “Noise & Grain” menu. This used to be a very expensive 3rd party piece of software and getting it free with 6.5 was a huge bonus. It is a fantastic grain removal tool but slow. The best thing to do is read the help files, but it’s worth noting that the filter does both Spacial and Temporal filtering, but temporal filtering is turned off by default. You can manually set it up to analyse different areas of your footage and it will degrain the result accordingly.

The “Remove Grain” plugin is not a trivial filter, it will take a bit of effort to get to know it, and some playing around to get the best results. But it is a serious tool and worth the effort. A few years ago now I “rescued” a bluescreen which had been shot on 16mm film, largely with this filter. While film presents very obvious grain problems for keying, video footage benefits immensely too- especially dodgy DV footage or low-light high-gain stuff.

Hope you have fun playing,

-Chris Zwar

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

Just as an aside, I find the quality of AE’s compound blur to be pretty poor when compared to 3rd party compound blurs. The Pinnacle one (which comes with Composite Wizard) gives a MUCH better result, and if there’s a Tinderbox, Boris or Saphire equivalent then I’m sure the difference will be just as noticable.

-Chris

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

Oh. The only thing I can think of is that although the file is an avi, it’s a non-standard codec such as a DivX variant or similar. In that case I can’t offer any suggestions.

I have experienced exactly what you describe when trying to use DivX footage, although exactly what codec it was I don’t know. DivX seems to cover a wide range of things….

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

Good keying is not neccesarily easy, but if you want to take the optimists’ point of view then working with difficult keys will give you a lot of experience.
I like Keylight and think it’s great, and if you haven’t read the manual that comes with it (as a PDF) then that’s a good place to start. It’s very helpful. And when you’re keying with Keylight, use the “status” setting- it is invaluable. Look it up in the manual.

If you’ve done all that, then it sounds like the next step is to play with the matte chokers. AE has 2 in the “matte tools” area- the simple choker and a more complex version called “matte choker”. They’re extremely useful and just this week the AE matte choker saved some footage I thought was un-usable. When you use them, try viewing the alpha channel in the main composition so you can see exactly what they’re doing.

Beyond that you start to get into more complicated territory and 3rd party plugins.

A really complex key might involve the following steps:

1- degrain the source footage, and if neccesary, de-interlace it too with a 3rd party deinterlacer like fields-kit.
2- use the HSL filter or another colour correction filter to enhance the key colour in the background
3- use something like Pinnacle Composite Wizard’s “smooth screen” plug-in to even out the background.
4- use masks to create a garbage matte around your main subject matter.
5- key using keylight, which is the best keyer which comes with AE.
5b- for very complex keys, masking the source into multiple pieces with individual settings tweaked for each piece.
6- removing specks or holes in the matte if keylight hasn’t done it for you
7- cleaning up the edges of the matte with a choker or matte feathing plug-in or both
8- hand painting difficult bits frame by frame
9- removing spill with a spill suppressor

Check out the “Composite Wizard” which is sold by Red Giant Software, there are other equivalents too by other vendors but I can’t think of any just at the minute.

Hope this helps, keying is unfortunately not as easy as it should be!

-Chris

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

Yes, I probably should have explained that’s what I meant.

On a Mac, you cannot import an AVI directly- the file selecter does not let you pick avis. I assumed that Alexander wanted to get an AVI into After Effects (because this is the AE forum) but because you can’t do it directly on a Mac, was asking for a way to convert it to a mov.

Perhaps I assumed too much, but I thought that by explaining how you can import an AVI into AE running on a Mac, you don’t need to convert it first- and then, as you suggest, you can just use AE to render it out as a mov 🙂

-Chris

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

I assume you are on a Mac.

You can import .avi into After Effects, by telling AE it is a Quicktime movie. When you go to “import”, select “show all files” or whatever it is at the top of the finder window. This will allow you to select the avi. Then down the bottom, where you have to specify the file type, choose “Quicktime”. Annoying, but works perfectly.

-Chris

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

Channel -> Invert and select Alpha.

-Chris

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food