Chris Zwar
Forum Replies Created
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The newer versions of After Effects come with Keylight, a 3rd party keying software now given away with AE for free. It’s brilliant, and the manual/ tutorials which come with it are very good too. Keylight is on the After Effects CD but has to be installed separately. The manual is a pdf file which gets installed with the software, and is unusually well written and informative.
-Chris Zwar
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Hi,
The animation codec at 100% is lossless, and supports an alpha channel. But the compression is fairly limited and so the file sizes are really big, depending on your image content.
The JPEG codecs- Photo JPEG & Motion JPEG, are practically lossless at 100% and will be about 1/3 the size of the same files compressed with animation. There will be some very minor rounding errors but no actual compression artefacts. Certainly nothing visible. However they do not support an alpha channel.
If you are totally utterly and completely anal about preserving image quality then the animation codec is your best bet. Otherwise, if you don’t need an alpha channel, Photo JPEG or Motion JPEG will save you about 3 times the disk space. In all cases, you need to have the quality set to 100%.
Personally, I use Photo JPEG at 100% whenever possible, otherwise it’s animation for anything with an alpha.
These codecs are Quicktime based and cross platform.
-Chris Zwar
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If you can afford it, or have the time to play with demos, then the “Tinderbox 1” set of plugins has a heathaze effect which is just gorgeous, I use it a lot. The settings can be tweaked to give a wide variety of effects including fabric rippling in a breese, not just heat haze.
-Chris Zwar