Doyle Rockwell
Forum Replies Created
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Howdy,
Just to clarify: it’s not the locking/unlocking of the bezier handles, it’s the locking/unlocking of the entire object. This is done via the little lock icon in the Layers List or Timeline.
For example, if I animate the position of a shape object and the keyframed motion path is curved, if I lock the shape before saving, the motion path will be linear (zeroed tangents) when I next load the project. Once the damage is done, though, unlocking the shape won’t restore the tangents. I’d need to unlock the shape, then manually set the tangents back to what I want.
In short: don’t lock animated objects if you want them to stay the way you left them.
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Howdy,
I’m confused by your response. I was saying that locking an object will cause all bezier tangents to get reset when the project is next opened. Once the damage is done, however, the zeroed tangents get saved (when you next save) so you can’t reclaim them. Just make sure that everything is unlocked before you save. I just reproed this on my system.
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Howdy,
I remember seeing this a while back on Apple’s Motion forum. If you lock an object, save, then reload, bezier tangents don’t get read in, correctly, and are lost. Unlocked objects don’t suffer this problem (as described on the forum). Were your objects locked?
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Howdy,
You can change the project’s Render Quality to Best, which will perform higher-quality resampling on scaled objects, even individual particle cells. It’s a project-wide quality switch, though, and you can’t opt-out per object, so everything will be rendered that way, which may have a serious impact on performance. You may want to lock down the look of your particles, pre-render them in Best, then re-import to your Normal-mode project.
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Howdy,
This is a problem that a bunch of people have encountered. Just trash your prefs and that window will reappear on next launch. The Motion prefs are at:
YourUserHomeFolder/Library/Preferences/com.apple.motion.plist
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Howdy,
Motion projects (embedded in FCP or not) are always rendered on the GPU. One thing to watch out for is that FCP 6.0 defaulted the sequence settings so that Motion projects would get rendered in Best quality mode in FCP, regardless of the Motion project’s settings. This was changed in FCP 6.0.2, but the old setting will persist unless you’ve trashed your prefs (or manually change the setting). You can read about it here.
Best mode renders text extremely slowly, which can murder the render times. The only visible difference will be on some objects animated in 3D. I highly recommend sticking with Normal mode (the same quality in Motion 2) unless you see things looking chunky. Your render times will likely drop to much closer to what you get directly in Motion.
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Howdy,
That halo is definitely in the image as a hot green line that is brighter than the actual background. I’m assuming it’s some sort of blooming artifact. Anyway, adjusting the Noise Removal value in Primatte cleaned most of it up. I added Matte Magic and did a tiny bit of choke and feather to remove the rest of the halo and try to soften some edges. The fine hairs on his ears picked up a lot of light and created a hard edge, as well.
Finally, I added a little bit of light wrap to make the blending a little better, including the hardness of his right cheek. Here’s a screenshot:
The project, with the filter settings I used, can be found here.
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Howdy,
Digibeta is 4:2:2 so it can have some impact on the image quality, but I’ve pulled a number of keys in Digibeta footage without any issues, so that’s not likely to be the issue.
In that blow-up, I can see a little bit of a halo running along the subject’s shoulder. Any chance you can post a 100%-scale PNG (no compression) of the image? Then I can take a stab at pulling a key and see if I encounter the same problem.
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Howdy,
Sure, you can set this using the Opacity Over Life gradient, found in the particle’s Inspector settings. You define a gradient that controls how particles fade in and out over the course of their lifetimes.
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Howdy,
What format/medium was used to acquire the footage? If it was a lossy one (DV, HDV, DVCPRO, etc.), then the compression causes artifacting the blue and green records, resulting in chunky edges that are revealed by the keyer.
Some keyers will blur the green or blue chroma (or both) to help camouflage the damage caused by the format. Primatte RT doesn’t have this capability, unfortunately. If you are keying lossy footage and need a better result, I highly recommend dvMatte Blast or dvMatte pro, both of which are cheap, run extremely fast and are designed to compensate for the artifacting found in lossy formats.
If you didn’t shoot on a lossy format, it’s possible that there’s a hard green rim on the edge of the subject, which could spoof the key. Can you post a screenshot of the footage unkeyed?