Grant Swanson
Forum Replies Created
-
Try using a displacement map with a black and white smoke video (you could even create your own using Fractal Noise) as the source of the displacement (I would probably increase the contrast of the smoke video, and blur it out slightly as well).
As the displacement becomes more intense, simply decrease the opacity. You could also play around with the layer’s blending mode.
Hope that helped!
-Grant Swanson
-
My best advice to you would be to start working on some extreme garbage masking, and to separate the shot using masks in order to run multiple passes in Keylight/Primatte.
Perhaps before you pull the key, create a rough mask around the actors and do some color balance to remove some of the red on their faces and clothes. Obviously don’t go so far as to remove the red from the background, but just reduce as much as you reasonably can on the actors themselves. Pre-comp that and then start the garbage masking and plate separation with several passes of Keylight/Primatte.
Hope that helped!
-Grant Swanson
-
For secondary color correction you might create an adjustment layer and apply your effects to it, masking it off to the areas of the shot you need, and feather it out, of course. Almost all your color correction can be achieved using Levels, and for just about anything else you need, you can add Hue & Saturation to that.
While those two effects work great, they can be a little awkward to work with, so for a good 3-way color corrector for After Effects, I would check out Colorista, by Magic Bullet.
Hope that helped!
-Grant Swanson
-
I know I’ve posted on this a few times now, so you might read some of my other posts for more in-depth explanations, but to be brief and answer your question, use a TIFF sequence with LZW compression set. This is completely lossless, and is the unofficial industry standard.
Hope that helped!
-Grant Swanson
-
First off, do you have the Adobe Production Collection Suite, or whatever it’s named? Because then you will have Dynamic Link, which I believe allows you to just import your master After Effects Composition straight into Encore DVD to burn it.
That would be your best option, since it’s lossless and fast, and then Encore let’s you burn to Blu-ray or DVD.
I would definitely check out the Encore forum on Creative COW for some tips on how to get your footage into Encore effectively if you don’t have the Adobe bundle.
Since you’ll be burning to disc anyway, you might as well convert to MPEG-2 before it gets into Encore (that is if you DON’T have the bundle).
So in the render queue dialogue change the format to MPEG-2, and adjust the settings (there aren’t that many), for most of them you’ll just want to leave them at the highest setting. For the bitrate, obviously the higher the better but it will leave you with huge file sizes, so you’ll have to decide on that one, which is more important, file size or quality?
And remember you’re only exporting as MPEG-2 if you don’t have the Adobe Bundle! If you do just import it using Adobe Dynamic Link!
Hope this helps,
-Grant
-
It would be best to have the images processed with 1.07 non-square pixels to begin with, but it’s not necessary. While you work on your images in After Effects (a non-square comp with the square images) you images will look squished, but they won’t be rendered out that way – you can hit the “Toggle PAR” button to see what the final result will look like.
When you scale the image down to DVD size, since you are just fitting to the Comp Width (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+H), but still keeping the aspect ratio, your images will not be distorted, there will just be black bars on the top and bottom, keeping the 16:9 ratio.
You can start with as many dots per inch as you’d like, the standard is around 300. Just make sure in After Effects you’re working in 16 or even 32 bits per channel to keep that quality.
You could make one high-def version as long as the means you have to play them are high-def. I had the impression one of them was DVD, which can’t display HD content, which is why you would have needed to scale it down to 720×576.
And keep in mind that the tiff sequence is only for your work flow and the video master at the end. Your final formats can’t be tiff, since it doesn’t hold audio.
The size of the screen won’t affect the quality of the video, as long as the screen can play your 1080 footage. You’ll need to export the master twice if the two screens have different resolutions. For example, a non-HDTV can’t play HD content, so the 1080 version won’t work on that TV, which is why you needed to scale down to SD size.
For each different “scene” of your video, I suggest that you make a new composition, at the frame rate you want and retouch them all separately (you can now render out each scene as a separate tiff sequence – make sure you create a file to store them in, or you’ll have a mess of hundreds of tiff images), and when you’re done with them all, just layer all the compositions (or tiff sequences if you rendered out the compositions) together into one final composition that you will then render out as the master.
You’re comp needs to be set to work with whatever PAR the video format will be – so for the master 1080, I believe it will be square, and for the DVD PAL I think it’s 1.07.
It’s very confusing and I don’t think anybody understands everything about it completely.
So, I’ll try to summarize what your workflow will look like: 1) Import your pictures and mess with each scene in its own comp.
2) Add all of these sequences to one final composition.
3) Render that out as a tiff sequence (inside its own folder, of course) with LZW compression.
4) Create the audio track (.wav is good).
5) Re-import that into AE, and create a new comp with the size that you need, for the DVD it will be 720×576, and drag the tiff sequence into the timeline, and hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H to scale the sequence to the WIDTH of the comp, which automatically keeps the correct aspect ratio.
6)Add the audio track to the timeline, making sure things are lined up.
7) Export to the format you are using, whether it’s MPEG-2 or whatever.
8) Burn the format.
9) You’re done!
Wow, I need a sandwich.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have more questions.
-Grant
-
No, when you scale it down you will need to make sure that you scale it proportionately. You can just “Fit to Comp Width” (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H) which will scale your footage to the right size, keeping the correct aspect ratio, but you will have black bars on the top and bottom.
At the minimum your images will need to be 1920×1080, so that they are full quality – remember though, when you scale them down you will create some artifacts and will lose some quality.
You want to leave the pixel aspect ratio set to whatever it was when you imported the pictures, don’t mess with that or you will have a squished or stretched image.
Once you have you’re final video done, I think it’s best to render out the final “master,” as a tiff sequence, which is completely lossless (make sure you use LZW Compression though, or the file sizes will be enormous), so that from that, you can re-export all of your different formats – for you the high-def version and the DVD version.
The quality of the tiff sequence is far superior to that of a Quicktime sequence. When you import the the sequence just check the “TIFF sequence” box, and it will show up in the project window as a sequence of sorts.
Hope this helps! If you have any more questions feel free to ask.
-Grant
-
Andy,
I’m not exactly sure what it is that you’re asking, but I’ll try and clear as much up as I can. First off, you’ll want to work with the same resolution, regardless of whether it’s being projected, printed onto film, or shown on plasma TV’s.
No, RGBs will NOT work. Go with a TIFF sequence,
which is the industry standard.
I would say since you’re exporting to a 16:9 format, just set your composition to 1920×1080, which is full high-def – 16:9, then crop off your photos to those dimensions, you could scale them down if necessary, but you will lose some quality.
How are you going to be showing this, on a DVD? Blu-Ray? If on a DVD, after you export your tiff sequence, you will need to re-import that into After Effects, and scale it down to the DVD size (720×576 for PAL I believe), then export that.
I’m not sure if you’re asking if you’re composition needs to be 8-10 feet large, but that would be absolutely ridiculous! You won’t be able to notice your high-def pixels, even projected onto the screen.
In Star Wars Episode three, I believed they cropped the movie’s height down to something below 1,000 pixels, which, when printed onto film it wasn’t noticeable at all.
Hope this helps, I’ll try to answer more if you have more questions,
-Grant
-
Then you are just using a trial version of the Cycore Effects, you have to pay for the license to use them. What version of After Effects are you using?
In CS3, they’re pre-installed, but in 7.0, you have to install them (they’re included on the DVD), and type the product key into the “Utility” menu, under the Effects menu.
-
Do you have any sort of live-action video in your comp? Since After Effect has to render that out, as well as the final video, it will make the file size huge, especially if you’re rendering out to an uncompressed AVI.
If you must render out using an AVI file, then I would say go for the “Microsoft Video 1” compressor under the Format Options, then drag the quality up to 100%, it will be a reasonable file size, with only a little quality loss.
Last but not least, one of the most common rendering mistakes I see people make, is that they have AE render out an alpha channel by accident. Seems obvious, I know, but it happens all the time.
They’ll have the “Depth” setting to “Millions of Colors+” rather than “Millions of Colors,” thinking that it means greater than millions of colors, not millions of colors and an alpha channel. So make sure you’re not rendering out an alpha channel. 🙂