Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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Trying to key from black can be challenging to begin with. In your case you also have to deal with way too much light on your black background, making it more of a gray in several areas.
It might be possible to produce something usable but I expect that it would take a good amount of rotoscoping. Depending on the length of the piece that may or may not be a big deal.
In general for any sort of screen (black, green, white, blue) it would be ideal to separate your subject from the screen as much as possible. This has a few advantages. For chroma keying (blue/green) it reduces spill onto the subject. For any background color it allows you to light the subject and the screen with entirely different setups.
In your case specifically I would’ve recommended shooting in a dark room (ideally a studio) on a table with the house lights off. Light the subject and don’t put any background behind it: let the blackness of the room behind the subject fill out the background.
Even with that kind of solution keying from black can be challenging. You’d have to try and fill as many of the shadows in your subject as possible so that none of the color in the foreground drops too close to black.
Darby Edelen
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I’m not sure what version you’re using but I think since at least R12 there has been a “Save Project File…” button under the Compositing Project File section in the Save menu of the Render Settings.
Darby Edelen
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If you are in fact keying 70% of the frame I might recommend trying a render in QuickTime Animation at 100% quality.
This uses a form of Run Length Encoding that saves a lot of space when the same values appear over and over again in footage (solid colors like alphas work especially well). Render your footage with Alpha and Premultiplied and the transparent portions of your image should be compressed very well.
The files are lossless so they won’t be super small, but the use case you describe sounds almost ideal for the Animation codec.
Darby Edelen
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Spill slayer looks to be an implementation of the Channel Mixer method I mentioned. That’s almost definitely how it’s working under the hood. It’s way more straight forward to use though 🙂
Darby Edelen
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Looks like Adam already has you covered on the QMC front 🙂 I’ll just add that the Sample Count in GI is directly related to the Indirect Illumination sampling subdivisions in the previous Physical Renderer options. The number of samples for a given pixel was equal to the square of the subdivisions in R13/14. So If you entered a value of 4 subdivisions in the Indirect Illumination tab this was equivalent to 4 * 4 or 16 samples in QMC.
I’m not sure if you were saying that your animation consists only of camera animation but if so the settings you’d want to change are on the “Cache Files” tab of the GI settings. Disabling the “Full Animation Mode” checkbox will render the caches as a Camera Animation.
The new Light Mapping GI mode is a good alternative/addition to Radiosity Maps. You can still “Build Radiosity Maps” through Light Mapping to speed up QMC or IR calculation but you get the added benefit of many many more secondary light bounces. On the downside light mapping can sometimes introduce subtle splotchy artifacts or softness in shadows so settings there may need to be tweaked as well. The documentation goes over this really well. Also if you’re doing camera animation (and only if so) you’d want to enable “Use Camera Path” in the Light Mapping settings.
Darby Edelen
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Honestly stepping through this footage one frame at a time this looks less like a fast moving dot and more like a randomly moving dot 🙂
Since you’re generating this dot in AE, why don’t you slow it down some? Instead of animating over 2 seconds try 10, 20 or more seconds. Once you have your tracker keyframes you can always collapse them down to 2 seconds (if that’s the speed you need).
Also AE’s tracker tracks by luminance by default so I’d recommend just rendering a black dot on white. The only case where I’d recommend using colors is if you need to track more than one dot at a time in which case you can change AE’s tracker to track by RGB rather than luminance (which may take slightly longer to track).
Darby Edelen
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[Rob Grauert] “Any ideas as to why Keylight(1.2) is introducing noise into my footage?”
It’s probably Keylight’s crummy despill. Switch to the Intermediate Result instead of the Final result and see if that looks better.
If you then need to despill the footage there are other methods. One is described here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/1027628
That post is for green screens. For a blue screen you would mix the Red & Green channels to produce a new Blue channel (instead of mixing the Red & Blue for a new Green channel).
Darby Edelen
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Feel free to do some limited color correction on the footage before VFX so that the footage looks consistent but avoid doing any stylized or secondary color correction until afterward. Also you’ll want to color correct any assets that are being added to the footage to match the source’s color.
Beyond that I’d recommend that you use very small blurs on anything you’re compositing in (no real world lens will give you a perfectly sharp image) and add some grain to the composited elements as well.
Honestly AE’s toolset at this point is not the best suited for this sort of work (Nuke’s is better). It can all be done in AE but it’ll be more of a pain. Of course purchasing/learning an entirely new program is likely out of the question but I think it’s worth mentioning that better tools do exist.
Darby Edelen
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[Rath Balasubramaniam] “alt+drag”
ALT drag! That’ll teach me for trying to post from memory 🙂 Glad to hear it worked out.
Darby Edelen
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The stencil and silhouette alpha blend modes are also good options. These would be applied to a solid layer above the layers you want to mask.
Darby Edelen