Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[Bernhard Rieder] “just have not seen it yet in AE – without using any plugins.”
Again, it’s just an image. AE does natively support images 🙂
There isn’t anything super special about a position pass, the value is in what you or an application does with the data in the pass.
AE can’t do anything fancy with the data in the position pass out of the box, but with plug-ins or some color correction or even expressions you can still use the data to some effect.
Perhaps if you described exactly what you wanted to achieve with the position pass we could help.
Darby Edelen
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[Bernhard Rieder] “is it possible to use a World Position Pass without the use of any plugins inside After Effects ?”
Use it to do what exactly? The pass itself is just image data. It’s what you do with that image data that can make things interesting.
That said I’m not aware of any AE plug-ins that would use a world position pass and there aren’t many good reasons I can think of to try and use one in vanilla AE. You could use it the same way you’d use any other image. Maybe you’d be able to create some interesting mattes with it?
Is there something specific you’re hoping to do?
Darby Edelen
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[Rodney Bean] “When I change the position and scale keyframes at 4:30, my position changes at the 2 second keyframe, so when I go back to the 2 second keyframe the position and scale are completely wrong and changed when I added the position and scale keyframes at 4:30”
The position and scale values on the actual keyframe have changed? The only case I’m familiar with of that happening is when you have more than one keyframe selected and are scrubbing the value.
You might also check to be sure that you are using Linear Spatial Interpolation on your Position keyframes.
Darby Edelen
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I would generally use a 50% gray to white Ramp applied to a solid with the Multiply blend mode in a linear working space. If that sounds like a string of unfamiliar words then I’d recommend:
1) create an Adjustment Layer.
2) apply the Exposure effect and set the Exposure value to -1 (one stop down).
3) apply a rectangular mask to the Adjustment Layer. Position it as desired.
4) Increase the vertical feather on the mask.If you need more details write back and we can expand on this.
Darby Edelen
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[Laco Gaal] “The only thing I’m missing is the parallax movement of the clean plate…But it seems we’ll have to live with that:)”
I’d love to take a look at your test file and advise on how to overcome the parallax issue, but the file transfer site you used is blocked on my corporate network and on my home ISP.
You can upload files directly to the COW by using the button on the far right above the new message text box (at the right of all of the text formatting buttons, it looks like a floppy disk).
Darby Edelen
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One way to get this done would be to:
1) Make your video layer a 3D layer.
2) Apply your tracking data to a Null object.
3) Create a new camera and parent it to the Null object.
That should do it.
Darby Edelen
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[Laco Gaal] “Do I have to “simply” mirror the camera movement on the X axis?”
Not exactly. You need to mirror across the, erm, mirror 🙂 You also don’t need to mirror the camera, you can mirror the layers you want to reflect.
To do this you’ll need good tracks around the mirror to determine it’s location and orientation. Then I’d recommend creating a solid layer with those transforms to use as a matte for objects appearing in the mirror. This is also a good way to check your track of the mirror, the solid should stay locked to it.
Next you can duplicate the layers you need to be reflected, parent them to your mirror solid and enter a scale of [100,100,-100] on it (flipping its z-axis). This will flip all of the duplicated reflection layers across the plane of the mirror. Last step is to matte the reflection layers with the mirror solid.
This is all assuming that your reflection layers are 3D layers. Also, you could optionally pre-compose all of the layers you need to reflect and collapse transformations on that pre-comp, then you only need to duplicate the pre-comp and parent it to the mirror solid to reflect/flip all the layers. If you also enable the collapse transformations/continuously rasterize switch on the mirror solid you made earlier you can use the Set Matte effect to matte the pre-comp with collapse transformations. No messy track mattes that way, pretty straight forward.
Here’s a sample file with a simulated camera track:
Darby Edelen
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So when you view the alpha (alt/opt-4) is it showing those painted areas as black (transparent) or white (opaque)?
Is your transparency grid turned off in the comp viewer?
Darby Edelen
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[Ole Bendz] “However, he is not due to actually be in the sequence until 6 seconds in; but I can’t for the love of god find a way of doing this.”
It sounds like you want to track the background panning shot (2D track or camera track may work) and then attach (2D) or place (camera track) your keyed footage into the shot where it will be visible beginning at 6 seconds.
Can you give more detail if that’s not what you’re trying to do? Perhaps post some pictures?
Darby Edelen
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[Josh Bates] “Back to the main question, would 8GB RAM be enough to run after effects smoothly? Geekbench shows I get 3788 at the moment (I have 10GB?) and the MBPr gets 6340.”
Yes. However you would be limited in the number of background processes you could use in Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously. Depending on the project you might be able to render 2-3 frames simultaneously. If you had 16GB of RAM you might be able (again depending on the project) to push that to 3-5 frames simultaneously.
Geekbench is most likely measuring the speed of the RAM. While that’s important the amount of RAM you have doesn’t affect its speed.
In general with AE if you can afford more RAM you should go for it.
Darby Edelen