[Graham Macfarlane]

Thanks for your reply Cassius.

CopyMask2Layer is certainly an interesting script but it appears it only deals with masks.
I need to create shape layers (to have access to the pixel size parameter) and then copy/convert these into a mask on the text layer.

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Thank you Walter for the confirmation and the interesting info on compression!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Hi Keith,

Thank you for your reply!

I’m using After Effects CS5 on Win 7 x64.
I’ve attached a screen grab of the settings explained in my first post:

I had a closer look at all my DNxHD files and noticed that compared to the ProRes originals there is a very slight noise softening that is just appreciable at around 800% zoom. This fact though, should affect both A2 and B2 equally.

I also realised that video A contains a slightly higher proportion of areas of near solid colour (eg a clean painted wall) compared to video B (eg containing a bush). Could this really attribute to near 50% compressibility?

Below is a list of all the other compression tests I’ve run to try to make sense of this puzzling situation.

ProRes originals (I suspect they were originally 8bit but supplied to me saved as 10bit, unsure how to check):
* A1 = 1800MB (zipped: 1791MB) (approx. 0.5% compression)
* B1 = 2010MB (zipped: 1985MB) (approx. 1% compression)

DNxHD: (only 100 frames compressed for speed)
* A2: 8bit prj – output depth-millions – 1080p/25 DNxHD 185 8bit = 90.5MB (zipped: 49MB)
* A3: 16bit prj – output depth-trillions – 1080p/25 DNxHD 185 10bit = 90.5MB (zipped: 60MB)
* A4: settings as with A3 but 100f are from different point in video = 90.5MB (zipped: 41MB)

Strangely A4 zips better than A3. Both have locked off cameras but A3 has two moving actors in shot compared to A4 only having one actor moving in shot.

* B2: 8bit prj – output depth-millions – 1080p/25 DNxHD 120 8bit = 59MB (zipped: 58.5MB)
* B3: 8bit prj – output depth-millions – 1080p/25 DNxHD 185 8bit = 89.5MB (zipped: 88.5MB)
* B4: 16bit prj – output depth-trillions – 1080p/25 DNxHD 185 10bit = 89.5MB (zipped: 88.5MB)

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Thanks Roland,

This is exactly what I was looking for!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

You’re very welcome!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Yes you’re quite right! I should have said 7 mattes.
Thanks for your advice!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Thanks Walter for your reply.

Sorry I should have been clearer:
The seven elements that need varied colour correction are all in a single 3D render. The seven masks were rendered with it to help control each element separately.

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Thanks Ben,

I had all my different render passes in the same folder upon which the “Force Alphabetical Order” ends up loading them all as a single sequence. Not a big issue though, as I just had to move each pass to its own sub folder.

Cheers!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Downloading now!!!
Cheers!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Tudor, thanks for the link. Very useful info there!

Darby and Walter,
I have an asset containing coloured blurry graphics against black (no alpha channel) which I wanted to be against white. When Track Matting the asset in AE to make an alpha and using this over a white background one sees dark fringing in the blurry edges of the graphics.

I could have rendered out the asset with this alpha and then loaded it back in and interpreted the footage using, Premultiplied – Matted with colour (black) but I wanted to avoid the extra file space usage of an intermediate asset.

The Channel combiner effect does exactly what I need!
Many thanks for your help guys!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK