Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
-
How are you creating the images that you’re laying over the background?
Darby Edelen
-
So it is definitely related to the premultiplied images and the way that AE handles compositing.
This may seem counter intuitive but what you’ll want to do is composite all of your layers against black. Then use a copy of the footage at the top of the stack set to the Stencil Alpha blend mode to punch out the alpha from the lower layers.
You shouldn’t need to do this if you’re compositing onto a background directly, but if you need to render out again with alpha (or there’s an intermediate step where you need good RGBA values) then you’ll need to do the above.
Here’s an example file using the assets you provided:
Darby Edelen
-
An alternative I would suggest is to duplicate your background plate, place it above all the layers and mask the foreground subject as needed to block the text/shadow. This way if you add more background layers you won’t end up with another duplicated matte for every one.
Darby Edelen
-
[daniel tegeland] “If it’s not to much trouble could I send over a ae file and maybe you can have a look at it. You seem to know what you are talking about.”
Sure, no guarantees there’ll be a solution but I can take a look. If it’s a relatively small file you can upload to the COW otherwise you can use dropbox or something like that.
Darby Edelen
-
You should be able to get a similar result with the Time > Time Displacement effect. You’d use a linear ramp as the input. I’d highly recommend working in at least 16bpc as otherwise you wouldn’t have much temporal resolution when offsetting the playback.
Darby Edelen
-
You should be able to get a similar result with the Time > Time Displacement effect. You’d use a linear ramp as the input. I’d highly recommend working in at least 16bpc as otherwise you wouldn’t have much temporal resolution when offsetting the playback.
Darby Edelen
-
Forgot to mention, part of the color settings that you have to worry about when using EXtractoR is the linear color. If your working space is not linearized then the extracted color will look dark. I doubt that’s the issue as you would’ve noticed colors being off, but I thought I should mention it. If it is a problem then either linearize the working space (because: why wouldn’t you?) or use a Utility > Color Profile Converter effect to convert to linear.
Darby Edelen
-
I’m willing to go out on a very sturdy limb here and claim that the jump from AE 6.5 to AE 7 was probably one of the biggest in the history of the application… well, definitely in the interface 🙂 Getting a new book is a great idea.
As for your question about the value and speed graphs they reside in the Graph Editor in the timeline, the shortcut is Shift-F3 and the toggle icon is the farthest right above the layer switches (where the composition toggles reside: Motion Blur, Brainstorm, Automatic Keyframing, etc.)
Darby Edelen
-
[Marc Lucas] “The side it happened on was the side the back light was on so yes something to do with how the light is interacting with the footage and green screen when trying to key”
That makes sense.
The way sharpening filters generally work is by increasing contrast along edges. With your camera’s edge enhancement filter on it will see a bright white edge on your talent and say to itself “Aha! I should put a dark edge just on the other side of that light edge! My master shall be so pleased…”
Silly camera. Bottom line is that checking to make sure any sharpening filters are turned off in the camera before shooting green screen is essential.
You might be able to rescue this with some extremely clever blend modes/channel shifting/grading/roto or with the decidedly less clever Refine Matte effect. I’ve used it and it works really well sometimes, but if it doesn’t you’ve got to move on to other options.
Darby Edelen
-
Did you let AE know that the footage was premultiplied? Unless V-Ray was applying different gamma to the alpha than the RGB (which would show up as a problem in any compositing pipeline) I can’t see why the standard un-premultiply wouldn’t work.
If you’re using the EXtractoR plug-in you should note that the color and alpha settings you choose for the footage items in AE’s project panel will be ignored on instances of the footage with EXtractoR applied. The plug-in reads the data as-is from the file. If you want to un-premultiply an image using EXtractoR you check the “Unmult” box in “Process” section of the effect.
Darby Edelen