[Jack Binks]

Hi Adolfo,

The tearing artefacts you’re referring to tend to occur when the plugin cannot figure out differential motion within a scene (so foreground motion over background), or when it doesnt have sufficient detail to figure out what pixels move where. The first thing to try is to switch up the vector detail, so that vectors are calculated more often spatially, however what tends to be most successful is to provide the plugin with a matte. This matte should specify where the foreground object is, so the plugin can more easily differentiate between the two types of movement.

For a good example of this, and documentation from Kronos, check out the Foundry website on http://www.thefoundry.co.uk: go to Products->For AE->Furnace, then look down the right hand side for the manual and the examples links. Bear in mind the timewarp parameters are a little different, but the mapping shouldn’t be too different to figure out.

Another thing to bear in mind is that if you’re working with interlaced footage, which you’ve interpreted as normal in AE, you’ll want to be working in a comp with double frame rate, so you can check out what is happening on both fields and so the data is accessible So in pal, if you work in a 50fps project the alternate frames are infact the fields in the original footage.

All the best
Jack

The Foundry, UK

[Jack Binks]

Hi Jack,

Try precomping your source layer (leaving all attributes in the current comp), open the precomp, set it to 66seconds length, go back to original comp and extend the precomped out point to 66 seconds. If the clip is finishing before 66seconds then increase the time warp slowdown.

HTH
Jack

The Foundry, UK

[Jack Binks]

Hi Guys,

AS Adolfo says, timewarp is a licensed version of Kronos, essentially using the same code. The warp input allows you to push the pixels around one image based on the motion vectors (i.e. the relative, per-pixel, movement) of another image.

Essentially you apply Kronos/timewarp to the layer which is to be the source of the motion vectors, and then pick the layer you wish to displace from the warp drop down menu. Remember, it defaults to a 50% slow down as well, so if you don’t want to do any timeremapping as well as warping by motion, set this up to 100%.

I find it tends to work best when you’re looking to displace an image by some obvious abstract texture motion, so motion vectors from water/fire and so forth create some interesting looks. Your general result is more an effect (sometimes painterly, sometimes abstract), than a workflow tool. One of our Flame guys was showing me a groovy example using a fire texture with a large amount of per-pixel motion blur introduced using Kronos and then applied to another sequence.

If you’re looking for a tool to handle applying, for example, a pan from one sequence to a still shot, then check out F_Steadiness (which is also part of the Furnace on AE package) and using the ‘alternate motion source’ drop down.

HTH, if you’re still running into issues then can you make some footage available so we can take a look at exactly what you’re after?

Cheers
Jack

The Foundry, UK

[Jack Binks]

Hi Tony,

Apologies for the confusion – the manual which shipped with After Effects contained some outdated tutorials. A new version, which covers the updated operation, is available on our website. If you go to http://www.thefoundry.co.uk then go to Downloads->for After Effects->Keylight and click on the manual link.
One of the changes, as you have noticed, is to change the bias controls from sliders to colour pickers. Essentially you use these to pick the pervading foreground colour, so generally skin tone if it’s talent against screen type shots. The lack of a gang control is actually a small bug which will be fixed in an upcoming release of Keylight. In the vast majority of shots you need the biases to be set to the same colour, so, in the meantime, remember to pick the same colour for each.

HTH!
Jack

The Foundry, UK

[Jack Binks]

Hi Kermit,

There’s some good suggestions here (and I can also wholeheartedly recommend Mark Christiansen’s book as was suggested in one of the links above, if you’re after keying tips and other higher end AE info).
A common technique for Keylight use is to pull your key in a couple of passes…. dupe your footage layer with a basic key on it, then use the top layer to generate a hard edged matte that is eroded in. This layer now contains the solid inner areas of your keyed talent, so that on the lower layer you can just worry about getting the edges right.
Keylight’s pre-blur is designed to help deal with high compression footage as it softens the chroma in the channel used for matte generation only, use sparingly tho.
If you’re still running into issues, feel free to drop us a line at support at thefoundry.co.uk : we’ll get you an ftp account set up where you can upload the footage, and will have a look to see if we can come up with a working solution.

All the best
Jack

The Foundry, UK

[Jack Binks]

Hey Barend,

Thanks for the welcome; long time cow loiterer, so cheers to everyone for such a handy resource for everything from views to chat and news! Glad to hear Keylight is performing well for you; had a play with Key Correct Pro a little while back and they did seem like some neat tools; in fact the reference to other spill suppressors in my previous post was mainly aimed at Key Correct’s rather flexible spill killer 🙂

Cheers
Jack

The Foundry, UK

[Jack Binks]

Barend makes an important point about noise and spill suppression there: often what happens is that part of your foreground area is close enough to the background that the suppression has to work quite hard to remove what it sees as spill. This involves correlating across the other two colour channels into the screen colour channel (thus the R and B channels are used to help ‘repair’ the G channel); if these channels are noisy then this noise may become amplified by this processing.

To help avoid this you can use the method Barend suggests, you can use a separate spill suppression pass (using the AE spill suppressor if you’re not concerned about bit depth, or alternatively one of the other plugins available), or you can isolate that area of footage and set it as an inside mask. This inside mask is then not processed by Keylight (so not introducing any noise); you can post process this in the colour corrector of your choice if it doesn’t quite sit right in the final plate. This inside mask can either be losely rotoed, or you can pull a hi-con matte by your favorite method leaving this as the alpha channel and then configuring Keylight appropriately.

Jack

The Foundry, UK

[Jack Binks]

Hi Rob,

Interesting problem, is it possible you could shoot a couple of plates of the footage, along with the project file, over to support at thefoundry.co.uk so we can have a look? If copyright is an issue then perhaps just some cropped region of the plate would enable us to get a handle on whats going on.

Kind Regards
Jack

The Foundry, UK

[Jack Binks]

Hi Scott,

It does indeed sound like a pre-blur issue; if you don’t have any luck with looking into this, perhaps you could shoot a copy of the original uncompressed footage along with the AE6 project over to support at thefoundry.co.uk so we can have a look?

Cheers
Jack

The Foundry, UK

[Jack Binks]

Hi Hayden,

We are indeed looking into providing a more permanent solution for that particular issue. I’ve contacted you off list in regards to this.

Cheers
Jack

The Foundry, UK