[Erik Pontius]

he said “final result is HD…possible film print”

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

What do you have available? Keep in mind that Avid is primarily an NLE and not a motion graphics/compositing application. Most of the cool stuff you see on TV have been created with 3rd party applications.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

What I’ve done in the past, since I had the hard drive space and this was a relatively short piece, was to capture HDV into a 1080i HDV project, sort through my material picking selects from interviews and b-roll and making subclips. I then transcoded the subclips to DNxHD 145 to actually edit with. It was much easier and faster to work with the DNxHD clips on the timeline. I also had to modify a view of the interview selects to remove a reflection of a soft box light in a window behind the subject. I exported clips from Xpress pro at DNxHD and worked with them in AE then exported and imported back into Xpress Pro at DNxHD…very quick.
All the material I had (with the exception of graphics) originated on HDV, so I’m not sure what media your 8 and 16mm footage is on (beta/digi/HD/DVCpro HD/DV/etc…), Xpress Pro is only capable of capturing HDV and can’t capture any other HD formats (the Mojo is irrelevant when working with HD in Xpress Pro). So you’ll either be importing HD content captured with the Adrenaline or other apps…or capturing SD material with the Mojo.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I would think so or a lossless codec like Huffyuv. Always try to minimize any compression prior to actually compressing your video…you’ve seen what happens to copies or copies on the photocopier? Same thing…the more in more successive compression that occurs the more information is thrown out and the less quality you have.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Are you referring to the wipes that are used to transition between the host and show segments? Like the big ET that wipes across the screen, revealing the start of a segment on some hollywood celeb?

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I think I remember AK saying that he spent a couple of days splattering paint.
I doubt you’ll find many other collections for the price that AK sold his for. Stock video houses like Artbeats have ink tanks and paint splatters, but it can run $$$ for just one clip of several seconds.
I think there have been discussions in the past on the forum on how to create your own ink tanks and ink splatter. Basically, involved using high contrast paint and artboard… white paint on black board and vice versa…splatter paint and then do it all over again. Old aquariums filled with water and than various colored water pour into it…filmed from the side or below.
Just experiment with it…you might come up with some cool stuff that you’ll guarantee no one else will have (which is always a problem with stock collections…).
Apparently, before the wonders of AE, this kind of stuff was done quite often for films. I watched some behind the scenes stuff for “The Thing” a while back…the famous opening titles was a fish tank with a light behind it and a garbage bag being ripped away…

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Check your spill suppression…Keylight defaults to a light gray color for a replacement color….choose a color that is closer to the predominant color in your subject.
Also, check your “status” view in keylight…the light green areas indicate areas that keylight is modifying, in most case that is where you will see the majority of this “grain”. Also, there is a good chance that in order to key out large areas of your background you are having keylight process way more than is necessary and are taking out more of your subject than you need to. There are a couple of good tutorials, light the “super tight junk matte” tutorial that can eliminate the majority of your background allowing you to only worry about keying a small amount of your background around your subject.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Common thing is to use hi-rez photographs of interesting textures. AK used a lot of them in Riot Gear.
You could spend a day with a good digital SLR camera shooting any texture you come across….rust, dirt, peeling paint, dirty old windows, old fish tanks, you name it…. amazing what you can find just walking around your neighborhood.
Also, there are several royalty free image banks that have textures
Morguefile.com and https://www.sxc.hu/ (Stock Xchang) to name a few.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You’ll need to render out your keyed footage to a format that supports an “alpha” channel. For example, if you render a Quicktime using the Animation codec and have it set for RGB +Alpha, millions + and “Straight (unmatted)” you’ll create a large Quicktime file that includes an alpha channel that can be recognized by editing software. Different software applications have different ways of dealing with footage containing an alpha channel…some times it recognizes it on its own, sometimes you have to tell it to look for an alpha.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I think that a lot of the “grain” is keylight’s default choice of a light gray for color replacement during spill removal, which shows up a lot when using DV footage. I’ve been able to pull pretty good keys from HDV and DV footage using keylight by using techniques like the “super tight junk mattes” and Andrew’s keying tutorial….along with a lot of tweaking. I’ve used demos of other keyers like Primatte and they are good, still not a one-click solution, but I personally couldn’t justify the cost…I still had to do some tweaking to get good results.

Erik