Conrad Olson
Forum Replies Created
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I did look to see if I could export a ProRes file with chapter markers as I thought QuickTime would support it but I couldn’t see that option. Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right place.
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I ended up exporting the mp4 file without markers, then following this guide https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=103232 to using the Edit Index to export the markers to a CSV file.
Then I had to use a spreadsheet to get rid of most of the columns and match the formatting of the information to what an app called Subler needed: https://bitbucket.org/galad87/subler/wiki/Chapter%20Text%20Format
Subler then opened the mp4 file, imported the text file with the marker information in, and then combined the two.
Then I had chapter markers that showed up in QuickTime player and VLC and on the Apple TV via Home Sharing.
It’s a shame it’s not something that can be done straight from DaVinci.
And it’s also a shame that YouTube then ignores the markers and I had to manually add them to the description. But at least I already had the information in the text file. I just had to delete the last decimal place of the timings for each marker as YouTube only uses HH:MM:SS
If there is a better way of doing this please let me know.
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It is possible but a lot of work, and you can only go a certain distance before you will start seeing the limits of working with a 2D image. But this is basically what they do when they convert a movie that was shot in 2D into a stereo movie.
If everything is far from the camera you will have much more success than if anything is really close, because there will be less parallax for each object.
The best way to do this is with a 3D solution. I haven’t used After Effects for a long time so I can’t give you detailed instructions, but I can tell you the technique I’d use in Nuke and hopefully you can figure it out in AE.
The first step is to create a 3D camera track of your shot, then create cards or geometry for every layer you want to separate.
Roto each object and use the tracked camera to project each layer onto it’s card or geo. If you render the scene from the original camera you should end up with an identical image to your original.
Now duplicate your original camera and move it to the new position that you would like to view the scene from. Use this new camera to render your scene. You will see everything from a new angle, and you will also see all the gaps where you are now seeing parts of the shot that were occluded in the original angle. You need to use paint techniques to fill all of these gaps. Luckily, having a 3D setup will help with a lot of the paint task but it will still be a lot of work.
If you are only revealing a few pixels you might be able to get away with erodes, or scaling up the fg layer to fill this gaps, but more than a few pixels will require more detailed paint work.
At some point, if you move the camera too far you will be able to see that everything is just 2D layers.
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All the VFX companies that I work at have libraries textures like this that have been shot for real.
If you get a dirty lens and point your camera at a black surface, then shine some light in from the side you should be able to see the dirt on the lens and nothing else. If you move the light around you will get variations.
When we use the elements we usually just use a single frame of them and then just add or screen them over the final image. Because they are shot on black you don’t really need an alpha. You can combine them with a luma key of other layers, add mask, or animate their opacity based on changes in brightness of the image.
Another trick is to just paint some small white dots on an empty layer and then use a convolve filter to create a nice bokeh shape from them. You can the add some colour and add this layer on top.
We do use Optical Flares too. It’s much more flexible and is good when you need more movement to your flares but it never looks quite as organic as the real elements.
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I don’t have AE in front of me right now but I think you should be able to use the Set Matte effect. There are a few effects here that might do the trick:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/channel-effects.html
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It is usually easier to treat the key and the colour correction as two different steps. Precomp the layer with the key and place that over a copy of the original plate, and set the track matte mode of of the plate to alpha. That way you have the original image held out by the resulting alpha of your keys.
Once you have this setup is it much easier to apply colour corrections to your plate without effecting the results of they key, and without the spill suppression applied by Keylight.
There is a spill suppression node in After Effects that you could apply and that might give you more control, or you can use any other colour effects. You might have to do some garbage mattes but you should be fine.
Too many times people give the answer ‘reshoot it’. In some cases this is useful but dealing with spill suppression, and having green objects on green screen, is relatively common, even on Hollywood movies that I work on. You can’t always reshoot, sometimes you just have to make the stuff you have work.
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Well the proxy workflow is pretty easy for the editing part of the process, but you will want to switch back to the full res files before you do any After Effects or Speedgrade work. Ideally you lock your edit then conform that edit to the full res files, then work from there in After Effects and Speedgrade.
Proxy files are often different resolutions, and almost always different colour depth and colour space than the orginal footage. This is fine for editing but an cause major headaches in grading and VFX if you try to switch back to the original later on in the process.
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I think this could be due to rounding errors in calculations, and I think is down to the software rendering the files out. I have seen this before. It’s usually negligible.
But you’re right, not mathematically perfect.
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He isn’t trying to recover highlights that aren’t there.
He is trying to keep the highlights that he does have while rendering a precomp to use in another comp in After Effects.
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Dave, if you look carefully at the two waveforms in his original link you will see that he is definitely loosing some detail in the highlights in the second one. There is detail above 100 in the first one. There is still some clipping in the original image, but not nearly as much as when he rendered it out and re-imported it.
This conversation has been about solutions to that problem, not about his original footage.
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