[Darby Edelen]

[Cassius Marques] “there are projects in which we NEED to apply effects without affecting blending modes… We NEED to have a matte masking several 3d layers at once…It’s this lack of nodal compositing capabilities that gets me enraged in some cases, there are only lame workarounds that involves duplicating and linking cameras. It has been asked before several times and its also in my wanting list.”

Hmmm, while I understand the NEEDs I’m not sure I understand why they would currently require a lame workaround. I’ve almost never come across a situation in which the only solution was duplicating and linking cameras.

Can you give a more specific example?

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Have you tried creating a Null object from one of the tracking points on the surface you want to place the graffiti on? You can then parent your graffiti to that null and transform it as necessary to get it to stick to the surface.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

The rack focus is most likely causing some of the tracks to slowly degrade as the background becomes blurry. This may happen so slowly that the tracker doesn’t identify them as “bad.” You might have to do some manual removal of tracks. There are a lot of features in CameraTracker that are specifically designed to help you identify poor tracks and remove them.

This may not entirely solve the problem in your case, but it’s still good practice 🙂

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Lens Flares are one of those effects that should almost always be applied to a comp-sized 2D solid. Don’t move the layer it’s applied to, instead control the size and location of the lens flare with the flare’s effect controls.

Part of the reason I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around your setup is that it sounds much more complicated than it needs to be for the effect I think you’re trying to achieve. This makes me think I’m not understanding it properly.

Pictures or a project file would really help. Otherwise all the suggestions you get will be guesses based on assumptions and our own experience rather than solutions that we know will work based on your actual situation.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

The Collapse Transformations layer switch should get you 80% of what you’re asking for 🙂

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

You may have some chroma subsampling issues that could be partially resolved in After Effects by:

1) Applying the Channel > Channel Combiner effect.
2) Setting this to RGB to YUV.
3) Applying the Blur & Sharpen > Channel Blur and increasing the Green and Blue Blurriness amount (enter the same values, I recommend starting quite low). This blurs the U and V components (the chroma).
4) Apply another Channel > Channel Combiner effect.
5) Set this one to YUV to RGB.

You would do this before the key effect.

Other than that it’s difficult to say exactly what the problem might be without seeing the original green screen footage.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I’m having a hard time understanding the problem. Can you post some pictures or a scene file to show the issue? There are buttons to do this above the reply message box.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[John O'Riley] “Under Transform for the camera I changed all the position and orientation keys to 0, 0, 0”

Don’t change any of the camera transforms. Only the footage. Also make sure that the footage is parented to the solved camera and the Position of the footage is:

X = 0
Y = 0
Z = The ‘Zoom’ value of the solved camera

The 3D footage layer should look exactly as it did when it was 2D until you duplicate the solved camera and apply the smooth() expressions.

If you’re having trouble and can share the footage I can give it a shot.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

If you can get a decent camera solve then you might be able to use the 3D Camera Tracker or another camera tracking solution. You’ll probably need to roto out all of the actors in order to get the solve accurate.

Once you have your solved camera make the footage a 3D layer, parent it to the solved camera and place it directly in front of the camera with these transforms: Position [0, 0, Camera Zoom], Orientation [0,0,0] and zero out any other rotation.

Now duplicate the solved camera and apply a smooth() expression to all of the keyframed properties. Make sure this is the top camera in the composition.

Last step you’ll probably need to scale the footage layer up slightly so that it doesn’t leave the frame.

This works pretty well to smooth things out. You may want to play with the optional properties of the smooth() expression to improve the smoothing for your particular shot.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Looks like Bleach Bypass to me.

The easiest way to do this, but not necessarily the most flexible, is to add a Black & White adjustment layer above your image and set the blend mode to Hard Light. At that point you can adjust the Black & White sliders to brighten or darken specific color ranges.

Alternatively you can duplicate your footage, apply the Black & White adjustment directly and set the duplicate layer’s blend mode to Hard Light. Then you can sharpen or blur the layer to give a diffuse glow or gritty look respectively.

You can also mask the adjustment layer or the duplicate layer to localize the adjustment.

Soft Light will give you a less intense version of the look. Vivid or Linear Light will give you a very intense look.

Darby Edelen