[Erik Pontius]

Which Avid software are you using? Should be under Tools, Video Output. It’s analog outputs only (composite, component, s-video). If you don’t have a Mojo you’re probably not going to have it.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

According to Wikipedia, Elastic Reality was discontinued in 1999.

[Erik Pontius]

The “views” in Keylight are just for looking at the various elements such as your matte, what areas are being color replaced, etc… They can help fine tune your key.
The “grain” you’re seeing is probably keylight doing spill removal and replacing it will a color. The spill suppression can be tweaked and you can choose a different color for Keylight to replace the spill with.
The status view is really helpful for showing your matte and which areas are transparent, opaque and semi-transparent as well as any areas that have been changed (clipped, softened, etc…) by Keylight. You’re going to what to try to tweak the options under screen matte as well as experimenting with choosing different areas of your green screen (lighter or darker pixels) to see if you can get better results.
I once had to key a hundred or so short clips shot with the same subject (an actor sitting on a box) with a poor greenscreen behind him. It took a lot of experimentation in keylight to find the right blend. I then made a preset out of these settings, and used it as a starting point for all the clips.
If you haven’t done so yet, check out Andrew Kramer’s tutorial on Keylight (his DVD is excellent as well)
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=2&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/colorkey/index.html

and Aharon’s on supertight junk mattes (which has saved my butt a few times)
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=2&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/junk_mattes/index.html

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Try this article called “Calibrating Video Monitors” written up by the guys at Synthenic Aperture the makers of Color Finesse color correction software.

https://www.synthetic-ap.com/tips/index.html

It has the proper procedure to calibrate your monitors.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for compression….probably why there are professional compressionists making money at doing nothing but web compression.
The art of getting a small size and maintain good quality is gained from years of trial and error and experimentation. Each job is different…so there is no magic bullet settings.
Start with a good encoder like Sorenson Squeeze, Procoder and others (do some research and download some demos to find out what works for you and your budget) then start experimenting using built in encoding templates and then modifying/tweaking them to get what you want. You can spend days trying to get it right for one project, then have to start all over again for the next.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You might consider looking at the On2 Technologies flash exporter for AE.

https://www.on2.com/consumer/flix-exporter

I’ve been using it and does a pretty nice job.
You still will not be able to use the render queue, since you’ll export your sequence using file\export, but you’d be able to skip an intermediary step of rendering out QT’s just to turn around and encode them to flash.
You might download the demo and do comparisions between it and your sorenson workflow.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I stumbled up on that doc in the Bullit dvd I had seen it on TV at one point, pleasantly surprised to find it on the Bullit disc. I had almost passed it up thinking it was another 5 min featurette with a 10 mile high view on editing. Anyway, it’s one of the more useful and educational docs I’ve seen on editing.
The Cold Mountain DVD has a lot of good stuff, Murch does a wonderful running commentary that is very insightful.
There is also a book called “Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain….” That goes into detail through the whole process and the obstacles they had to overcome.
Murch’s book “In the Blink of an Eye” is also a must have for the editor’s bookshelf. The technology might have changed but the ideas and principals are the same. He also mentions why he prefers editing standing up…years of operating a Moviola upright. He goes into a lot of his other methods as well.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I love it when you get an interviewee with a good screen presence. Recently I’ve been shooting and editing a bunch of interviews for a corporate project. We interviewed one lady in NYC who had such a great screen presence, was well spoken (wasn’t cursed with the “um” disease) and had great facial expressions. When I cut the interview I had to drop in a little b-roll here and there to illustrate her story and cover cuts between bytes with the same frame comp, but kept it to a minimum trying to keep as much of her as possible.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t that lucky with all of them…

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Do a search for Motion Stabilization and Motion Tracking. AE’s built in motion tracker is used for stabilizing an image by tracking the movement of specific pixels you choose in the frame.
It can compensate for a little movement, but can’t do the impossible.

Here’s one tutorial I found:
Andrew Kramer’s tutorial on “Assisted suicide” touches briefly on motion tracking.
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I don’t believe it does. It would have to specifically support the import of .SCC files.
Sonic’s top end Scenarist authoring package does. Adobe’s Encore 2.0 does and Apple’s DVD Studio Pro software does.

CC data is contained in vertical blanking area of the video signal on line 21. MPEG compression will eliminate CC data unless it is preserved prior to compression. If it is preseved a separate captioning file is created which can then be added back in. Some applications, like Canopus’ Procoder software can preserve the caption data if the original source contains it. Since DV25 is also compressed, I believe that that line 21 data will be gone as well.

Erik