[Erik Pontius]

Also there are a couple of tutorials that can really improve the quality of you keys. I find Aharon’s “super tight junk mattes” technique to be extremely valuable in eliminating the majority of the background allowing you to key just a small area around your subject. That way you don’t need to do multiple passes or clip to much of your subject trying to rid yourself of the background.
Andrew Kramer’s basic color key tutorial can also help get you started.

Keylight is an extremely good keyer, but in order to pull a good key from even a well lit scene can take some tweaking. It’s rarely as easy as just picking a background color and going. It’s also going to be complicated by the fact that was shot on a fairly unforgiving video format. My advice would be to spend a little time reading through the pretty comprehensive PDF Keylight manual and run through some of the tutorials in it as well to get really familiar with and an understanding of features like screen balance, alpha/despill bias, screen matte, foreground and edge color correction.

Here are a couple of useful tuts from the COW:

Andrew Kramer’s basic color key tutorial
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/colorkey.php

Aharon Rabinowitz’s super tight junk mattes tutorial
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/junk_mattes.php

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Having worked for a number of years in product development for a major technology company, every bit of this is true for any product. No product would ever be released if there was a requirement to have all the bugs fixed prior to release.
Product development usually will classify bugs in degrees of severity, starting with bugs that are major (can cause severe loss of data, loss of life, etc…) that will prevent a product from being released, down to cosmetic bugs that don’t affect anything and most likely will never get fixed. In between are all the bugs that happen infrequently, don’t cause any major damage, etc… Those bugs are fixed if it won’t incur an extra cost or cause delays in the ship date. Once the product ships, the development cycle starts again as they now have time to fix bugs from the first release and introduce new features (and new bugs). Products developed for “mission critical” areas like the medical fields have longer (and more expensive) development cycles…beats having an expensive lawsuit.
The odd thing about this is that often people would rather have a buggy product NOW than than wait past the original ship date for a more stable product. Case in point, look at the iPhone early adopters and the RED One camera. The latter being even more ridiculous since people voluntarily took ownership of a product that they were told had bugs, missing features, etc… just to be the first on the block with it.

It is interesting that Avid states it so boldly while everyone else ignores it or just believes that it is understood. Perhaps they are trying to avoid or limit their liability.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Why not use the Avid codecs? If you AE box is on another system than your Avid system, the Avid codecs are available for download from Avid’s support site. Then export out of the Avid as a QT “same as source” and then import into AE. Or use a QT reference file if you Avid and AE are on the same box.

Other options are the fantastic Sheervideo codec from BitJazz.com which is quick, lossless and slightly smaller than animation or uncompressed. The encoder trial is free for 20 days, then you’ll need to purchase. The decoder is always free.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

oh…almost forgot. When you add you comp to the render queue and choose QT and Avid DNxHD as a format, you’ll need to click the options button on the format window to select the DNxHD resolution. For DNxHD 220 there are 10bit and 8 bit versions. 10 bit corresponds to the Avid DNxHD 220x format. Most likely they are working with the 8bit HDcam unless they are using footage recorded in HDcam SR and an HDcam SR deck which is 10bit.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

1920×1080 square pixels, upper field first.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Check with your MPEG2 encoder. There is a flag that is set during the encoding that denotes if the content is 4×3 or 16×9. Your authoring app will pick up on this.

Alternatively, if you don’t need to do any other work in AE, you can use the Avid “Reformat” effect, to letterbox, crop and pan & scan. Just make duplicates of you sequence and drop the effect in to an empty video layer at top most track.
Beats exporting from Avid, exporting again from AE, importing into Avid where it will be converted again…to lay back to tape.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Oh…one other thing. Since you are getting source video from an avid, be sure that AE is properly interpreting the video. It often mistakenly will not recognize that Avid files are interlaced and will not automatically separate fields. You’ll most likely need to interpret the clips in the project window as upper field first. This will avoid interlacing problems.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I work with Avid MC adrenaline and HDcam and AE on a daily basis. You will want to create your comps at 1920×1080 sq pixels upper field first. If you know what resolution they are working in on the Avid (DNxHD 145, DNxHD 220 or DNxHD 220x) You can download and install the Avid codecs from the downloads section on Avid support site and set up the render queue to export a QT file with the Avid DNxHD codec to match (this will speed up import back into avid). If you don’t know, export as QT animation using upper fields.
HDcam may be recorded with non-square pixels, but the process is transparent. As far as the Avid is concerned it is 1920x1080i sq pixels, and is the size the avid will capture, edit in and output.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You might look at TrapCode Particular as well. It’s a plug-in for AE. You can download a trial at https://www.trapcode.com/
If it does what you want, you can purchase a key to unlock it. Check out the tutorials on the site as well.

All these particle generators are going to have a learning curve.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

When auto-tracing and applying to a new layer, the new layer should appear directly above the layer you are auto-tracing when it is finished. Select the layer and hit M, you should see all the masks it has created based on your auto-trace.
I’ve also seen strange problems happen with auto-trace when only using a portion of a clip, say a 3 minute clip and you’ve trimmed it to one minute. Auto-tracing the entire clip, then pre-comping and trimming that seems to work.

Erik