[Curious Turtle]

The method given in my previous post will give you that. Rendering out Straight instead of Premultiplied maintains your RGB channels. Using Animation codec allows you to also encode the alpha into the same file.

Cheers,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
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[Curious Turtle]

What is it you’re trying to achieve? I get you need an alpha channel, but for what purpose? As you seem a bit peturbed that the luma key is keying your footage :o)

I *think* what you want is to have a file that contains unadulterated RGB channels and an alpha channel on top. This is no problem. Render out to Quicktime Animation with a Straight alpha and you’ve got it all! You can quickly check this by playing around with the Visual Settings in Quicktime Pro.

Hope that helps,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

Are you talking about the banding? That’s a common artefact of 8-bit per channel colour. Try kicking your project up to 16 bit or 32 bits. Some useful blurb from the manual.

Alternatively, adding a bit of noise can also help break up the banding.

You never said which formats you rendered to. Could also be a limitation of your export codec/compression settings.

All the best,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
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[Curious Turtle]

Your video link doesn’t work.

Try applying the tracking data to a Null and use parenting to link it to your text.

Cheers,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
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[Curious Turtle]

Without a screenshot to properly look at this, you could be seeing a number of things. Here’s a couple of ideas:

i) Motion blur. Depending how you shot your footage, the shutter speed can give you some nasty motion blur. This is baked into the image and can’t be removed. So when you stabilise the footage you’re still seeing smearing. This, of course, looks rather odd.

ii) Rolling shutter. A bug bear of recording video with a CMOS sensor instead of a CCD. Fast pans give you a lovely “jelly roll” effect.

iii) It might just be a bad stabilize you’ve done :o) You’ve got CS4, so have you tried with Mocha?

You’re on a Mac, so this may not be too helpful, but there’s a little Windows app, VirtualDub with a filter called Deshaker that will help on three fronts:

It’ll remove some shake, it will do a miracle on the rolling shutter and it will get you out of H264! You’ll want to transcode your source media before you start working on it. Taking it out to ProRes makes working with FCP and the rest so much easier.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
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[Curious Turtle]

I’m not sure if there’s a good step by step guide to doing this. I’ve had some success with it though. Here’s an example of one that works.

Effect matchname="ADBE Forensics-TrackScaleManual" name="CT: Forensics - Track Scale Manual"

(Note: the COW threw a hissy when using the <>, so just imagine them on either side of the code part.)

The most important part about the matchname is that it contains no spaces. The “name” part that follows can contain spaces and is the bit that’s visible when you apply the effect.

IIRC there were issues with changing the ADBE to something else. I might be wrong on that, as it’s been quite a while since I worked on them.

Is there a specific issue you’re having? Or will that get you out of trouble?

Cheers,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
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[Curious Turtle]

Rotation you can pretty much use the same expression. Rotation only has to be one dimension, so just change the last line as well to:

doIt

Position is a little different. Here’s one for Position (maybe not elegant but it works):

percentScale=20;
targetLayer=thisComp.layer("Your Layer");
initialTargetPos=targetLayer.position.valueAtTime(0);
a=targetLayer.transform.position[0];
b=targetLayer.transform.position[1];
doItX=value[0]-initialTargetPos[0]+a/(100/percentScale);
doItY=value[1]-initialTargetPos[1]+b/(100/percentScale);
[doItX,doItY]

It takes the target layer’s position value’s from the first frame as a baseline. You can change it if you need to in Line 3.

Hope that helps,
Ben

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[Curious Turtle]

Slightly less hacky version:

initialScale=100;
percentScale=20;
targetLayer=thisComp.layer("Your Layer");
a=targetLayer.transform.scale[0];
doIt=initialScale-percentScale+a/(100/percentScale);
[doIt,doIt]

Seems to work nicely. Set your target layer’s initial scale first, then you can set the percentage and offset.

Cheers,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
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[Curious Turtle]

There’s a number of ways to do this, and here’s one. It’s a bit (a lot) hacky and uses linear(), but it’ll do what you want it to do.

targetLayer=thisComp.layer("your layer");
targetMin=60;
targetMax=80;
endMin=1;
endMax=5;
temp=linear(targetLayer.transform.scale[0], targetMin, targetMax, endMin, endMax);
[temp,temp]

Just use the pickwhip to choose your “big” layer in the first line. Set your min and max scale values in the next four. I’ve used your values for the example.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
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[Curious Turtle]

A little technique I like to use is to:

i) Create a solid
ii) Add a Grid effect
iii) Turn 3D on
iv) Rotate it 90° in the X dimension
v) Make it a guide layer and lock it

That creates your ground plane and helps keep you oriented.

Cheers,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
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