Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[Dave LaRonde] “I don’t know how it’s done on a Windows box.”
Same way, only use alt instead of opt. Adobe is very good about keeping key commands the same (only sub ctrl for cmd and alt for opt).
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Make sure you’re exporting the AVI with Alpha. There’s a preset Output Module for just this purpose “Lossless with Alpha.” You can also modify your standard Output Module, make sure that the ‘Channels’ in the Output Module are set to RGB + Alpha (Default for Lossless is RGB, Lossless with Alpha is RGB + Alpha).
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[stevem1928] ”
I am considering just pouring some water from a bucket and keying it out.”I don’t think this would work well at all, especially with DV! But you could take some video of water being poured out of a bucket for reference footage, then you’d know what you’re aiming for.
I think one of the first things you’d probably notice is that the water lets a lot of the background through. I don’t know if this would give you results closer to what you’re looking for. Maybe if you tried pre-comping the water particles and lowering the opacity on that layer, then duplicating the pre-comp twice applying a CC Glass filter to one of them and use the other as a displacement map for an adjustment layer behind the water? A process similar to that might give you more interesting results anyway, I think it would look less like sand/salt.
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[rendernyc] “what is your source footage…DV?”
If your source footage is DV, you might try blurring the U & V channels (chroma) as DV has a 4:1:1 compression rate.
You have 4 times as much information in the luminance channel as in one of the chroma channels, which can be problematic for keying (done based on chroma). The ideal is to use a different format with a lower chroma compression, but if you’ve already shot the footage and you can’t get back into the greenscreen then you can try this:
Use the Channel Combiner effect (Channels > Channel Combiner) and change the ‘From’ field to RGB to YUV. Then apply a Channel Blur (Blur & Sharpen > Channel Blur) and play with settings for the U and V channels (correspond to the G and B channels in the Channel Blur). Blurring these channels will blur the chroma without touching the luma in your footage, blur it too much and the colors will ‘spill’ over the edges of the footage, blur it too little and you will still have blocky chroma channels… Play with the values =)
After you’ve applied the Channel Blur you need to get your footage looking normal again, so use the Channel Combiner effect again and change ‘From’ to YUV to RGB.
This isn’t ideal, but can provide for a better key from DV footage.
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Or turn the Point of Interest auto-orient off all together, I find this allows me to work more intuitively with the rotation properties for pans/tilts.
I’d also recommend setting your default spatial interpolation to linear (in Preferences > General) as the auto-bezier can sometimes create ‘boomerang’ keyframes. You can always go back in whit your pen tool and tweak the motion path to your liking, I like to have this extra degree of control over the camera.
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You can’t just mask the CC Cylindered layer because it will mask both sides of the cylinder. What you need to do is duplicate the text layer, put one of the text layers in front of the hand and set ‘Render’ to ‘Outside.’ Put the other text layer behind the hand layer and set this CC Cylinder’s ‘Render’ to ‘Inside.’
Then you need to make sure that any properties you’re animating for the two text layers are animating at the same time, I would recommend using an expression to make sure they line up.
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[pkpictures] “I went in and set both PC and MAC to use SMPTE-C for the working space and rendered the same Grayscale Bars on both.
I’m getting the same varied results.”That’s strange. I looked to the AE help for more information on Color Management and the only explanation I can come up with is that you need to use the same Color Profile for the displays you’re rendering from, i.e. sRGB (it shouldn’t have to be the same as the AE project’s though).
A few excerpts from the help:
“When After Effects displays pixels, it converts from the working color space (which characterizes the space colors are in) to the monitor profile (which defines how the monitor reproduces color) to produce predictable, consistent color.” (It wouldn’t make sense to me for the render to take the monitor profile into account, but maybe?)
“Because After Effects doesn
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[Nicholastoth] ”
Its a pretty handy effect, but again its frame by frame.”If the rope is perfectly straight (which it most likely is not, but I thought I’d mention this for people who face situations where it could be) you can motion track both ends of the rope and use that data for the CC Wire Removal. Speeds things up a bit, but it’ll probably still need tweaking by hand =)
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One of the major reasons you’re experiencing slower than desired performance is that you’re running AE7 on an Intel Mac. AE7 is not Intel-native on the Mac and must run through Rosetta which is fine for most uses, but can severely impact performance on high-end apps.
The best upgrade you can get for yourself is AE CS3, which is not available yet (I hear a beta will be posted at labs.adobe.com on April 16th). CS3 will be a Universal Binary and run natively on your Mac Pro, that should provide a bigger performance boost than literally any other upgrade you can make right now.
After that I would recommend more RAM, CS3 is supposed to be aware of multiple cores and will be able to take advantage of much more RAM than AE7 (which can only make use of 3GB). Right now 4GB is about right for After Effects, after CS3 you might consider going all the way up to 8GB (or more if you have cash to blow).
[Colby_Bclip] “I have been told that getting a better Graphics Card would hel”
I don’t know who told you that, but a graphics card really won’t help you very much with After Effects. The only time AE uses hardware accelerated graphics is for OpenGL previews and renders (which can give much different results than a final render), I personally never even use these. I don’t know what kind of enhanced OpenGL support might be included in CS3 though.
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Go into Project Settings (ctrl-alt-shift-k, cmd-opt-shift-k) and make sure that your Working Space is set to something other than none (what depends on your final output: Adobe RGB should be fine for most purposes, you could use SMPTE-C if you’re going to be viewing on a TV).
I believe that if you don’t specify a working space AE will just use your computer’s gamma value when encoding, which varies widely from platform to platform (and from computer to computer).