[David Bogie]

digiEffects has a set of great paint emulation filters. V_E_R_Y long render times on this stuff. You ahve no idea what you’re facing for turn-around time.

But such effects are so highly stylized that you cannot even think about doing them at 30fps. Change your footage to a pre-rendered movie at 10 fps are even less, maybe add your motion blur effects and speed ramping effects LONG before you attempt to add paint stroke emulation. You can even severely downgrade the pixel dimensions of the footage since it will be highly stylized.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

So you want to tanscode that to something non-GOP first?
Szusko’s probably correct about the spill suppressor.

You can research chromakey here and on the Net for many hours. it’s all been done and it’s all been fixed. Most fixes involve applying multiple keyers or masking to multiple stacked copies fo the same layer.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

visit CHRISH DESIGN (find it yourself).

Our most recent course for lynda.com is Lighting Effects in Post, created for After Effects, Motion, and Final Cut Pro. These are detailed walkthroughs of one of our favorite techniques: using footage of abstract, animated patterns and lights with blending modes to add excitement to other clips. In this course, we spent a lot of time explaining our mental process of why we would choose one lighting clip over another to complement specific shots, plus showed ways to modify the lighting clips to make them even more suitable for the underlying shot.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Enlighten us first, what format were you shooting, which of the many chromakeyers in the studio are you using and what codec are you rendering to?

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The Apple devices presets in Compressor are a good place to start but I’d go even further with the lowest common denominator and that’s MPEG1.
Your desire to email the finished export is not practical, though. it may or may not work, too many factors out of your control. More reliable to mount the file on your .mac account.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Joe Stenhouse] “Wow ok. Yes it will be blinking many times. I will look up “Expression” in AE help to see about that.”

Sorry, it was a bad recommendation.
You’re not ready for expressions yet.
But, to give you an idea of what will happen…you will se tup an expression slider that moves between 0 and 9. Each of the 10 stops on the slider will reference a different eye image. Your 10 eyes could be open, open wide, open left, open right, blink, unblink, left open right closed, right ope, left closed.

Yo place markers in your storyline track to indicate what eyes you need when and then set your expression controller at each of those points. It’s incredible. And it’s not that difficult to do since the Expression Controllers are stock effects and basic expressions are simple to program using the pickwhip. Advanced expression and scripting are so weird they have their own forum here and dedicated support systems on the Web.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

If your character blinks more than a few times, it will be far easier to use an Expression to reference the blink and unblink eye layers. Then all you have to do is keyframe the Expression controller. This is also one of the easier ways to animate mouth parts for phonemes.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

q[Ryan Zernec] “I would like the overhead lights to dim and the light from the hologram to reflect off of the guys’ faces and clothes. Does anyone know of any way to achieve this? “

Michael’s suggestion is the only thing that actually accomplishes your effect in post. Every object in the room will receive light from the hologram so they all must be roto’d.

This is a classic example of really poor direction and planning, though. If you have never done rotoscoping, you have no idea how difficult this effect is going to b. If you need any degree of realism, as if the scene were shot properly with on-set, motivational, and practical lighting effects, you’re looking at literally hundreds of hours of work.

What you’re going to need is a mask that will be used to apply your lighting effects to your characters, it doesn’t not have to be created by hand-rotoscoping but that is the only way to achieve any believability. If you have some time, shoot a test sequence with a flickering light source shining on the faces and bodies a couple of stand-ins.

A hologram of Hans Solo is not a point source light, it’s more like a tall skinny balloon with a light in it. If the room in which he is standing while he is being scanned for the transmission is completely illuminated, then the light source, the hologram, is a huge object. The light emanating from these two different hologram images is quite different and will have dramatically different effects on the stand-ins and on the shadows their bodies cast onto the objects in the room.

The best way to deal with this project is to reshoot it.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Butting in with a pointless suggestion. In monitoring similar conversation for years, I have noticed that loading the multiclip button bar often helps the interface perform as expected.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I give up and drink the koolaid.
The iMac is now an official, cow-sanctioned FCS platform.
I will point to this discussion whenever the topic comes up on apple.com. Upon your heads be it.

bogiesan