Jason Jantzen
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AE Expressions Coin
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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I suppose someone will ask this sooner or later – apps and OS are on SSD, right? Mine is too, and I have a pretty similar setup – i7 3990k with 32gb ram. Is your media on an external or internal drive? My media is on a separate drive, 3tb Seagate 7200rpm connected to a 6gb/s sata port. I still have a slight pause (3-5 seconds maybe). Nothing like 30-45 seconds.
You also said, “when the hourglass disappears,” is that a windows 8 thing? I’m on 7 still.
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
Right, you wouldn’t mask out the hair. This might be better done in two steps, first step being tracking her face so that you don’t need to keyframe the motion of the mask all over the place. That’s very easily done in Mocha. If you don’t know to do that, there is a ton of help on the cow for that too. Basically get a good track, then create a solid layer, draw a mask that masks out her hair, so you’re left with essentially a scalpless, body less girl – a head with no hair. You’re focusing on the hair, and only tracking the head, so you don’t need to reveal the whole girl at this point. There’s a drop down menu on the keyed out layer for the girl called “TrkMat”. Set it to Alpha Matte. This will use the mask you just drew on the white layer as a matte to reveal the layer below it (much like a clipping mask in Photoshop). Make sure the white layer with your mask, which is now an alpha matte, is parented to the tracking null (I usually copy the tracking data from Mocha onto a null object) so that the mask moves with the girl’s head. This way you don’t actually have to animate the mask, just make a shape that tracks her movement and then sometimes a few minor adjustments to the masks shape here and there. Go through and make sure the matte layer isn’t going crazy all over the place. Once you’re happy with that, duplicate those two layers. Delete the mask on the duplicated white solid you just made. This will reveal the girls hair, but also the rest of head. This is where the real work begins. You need to draw a mask that reveals only her hair and then begin keyframing that to track her hair and refine the edges of her hair.
Like I said before, you can choose this long drawn out method, which is pretty much rotoscoping her hair to catch all those wisps, or simply try the refine matte effect on the keyed out layer. This will give you some smoother, and more desirable edges – eliminating the chunky bits you’re talking about, but often times eliminating too much of the hair to begin with.
To get rid of that green bleed on the right side, you can try working with the spill suppressor (under the Key menu). That effect was specifically created to address what you’re talking about. Did you use Keylight? Because there are some tools in there to clean up the edge colors as well as any green light reflection on her skin if any.
Let me know if you need any more help, glad to offer it.
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
I have the 680 and can say that ray tracing 3D is actually workable with it at 720p. Nothing is really like butter at 1080p unless you break out some big big guns, like 2 quadro cards or something.
Anyway, Tigerdirect has the card here for $444 (rebate), which is where I got it about a month ago. That’s the best price I could find on the net, unless there’s a sale somewhere else.
https://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2300806&CatId=7387
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
Hi there Betsy,
My first guess at fixing the wispy hair, if I were to have a go at it, would be to add a mask around that section that you need to feather and then use that mask feather tool in cs6 (hopefully you’re on that). If you are in cs6, there’s also a quick fix that’s sorta like the new features introduced for the next version of after effects – that rotobrush tool, which is what you would use in Photoshop to extract wispy hair. You could apply the refine matte effect and that will account for motion blur and fine details, but again, it’s more of an auto fix. I’d try both of those first, if no satisfactory results, you might have to export the frames to a PNG sequence and edit each frame in Photoshop to get the best alpha channel possible.
You’re practically into rotoscoping when you have to get this detailed on a key, so get ready for some work and frame by frame attention 🙂
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
it’s kind of intriguing my brain now. how would you do something this, then? I mean you can resize a panel in AE and the other panels resize to fit like it’s magic, but in reality we’ve all come to take it for granted.
not that I want to fry your brain over this, but it does seem like there has to be a way to make adjacent shapes interact with each other. I think it would make a cool background animation (what I wanted to use it for on this current project).
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
i understand what you’re saying about translating the 3d null data over to the 2d plane. It makes sense in theory, but it wasn’t working when I hooked everything up. I did put the big expression on the 3d null and watched it move around fine. But the smaller expression on the 2d layer with the write-on effect didn’t write on at all. No errors or anything, just no writing.
But remember how I tried putting the big expression (the second one you wrote) direclty on the layer doing the writing with the markers on the same layer? That worked, but of course write-on stil keeps to its cooridnates no matter what you do. So tired trapcode particular and set the emitter so that it creates a stroke effect, basically just leaving a particle trail for however long you set it to. It works with the camera and basically does exactly what I was hoping your expression would do. The ONLY thing I’m having trouble with now, is the emitter originates from the center of the comp even when the first marker is a null away from the center. It doesn’t draw a solid line, just really spaced out particles then begins a solid line where the first marker is set. Do this make any sense at all?
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
so as you said to begin with, this probably wouldn’t work with write on because of the whole coordinate thing…well, you’re right, and I figured a way around it, but my computer cannot handle the processing to interpret all that expression data, which doesn’t seem like much, but moving the nulls around that connect to the write on effect makes everything REALLY slow to preview. my work around is basically just animating the null position where the write on lines connects to, which is really cool and plexus like, but I imagine plexus handling this 10 times faster or better.
Thanks again for your help Kevin. Glad we were able to affirmatively clear up any possibility of write-on ever being useful for camera moves. It was fun while it lasted 😉
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
I may have got this all confused, but what does seem to be working is using the first expression your wrote on the write on layer with the markers. I couldn’t get that last expression to work on the tracking layers like you suggested, but the write layer does work with the first expression. The only beef now is my early 2010 MBP is choking BIG time on these layers and expressions, but it’s working! I’ll see if I can’t get this to all connect up and then add my zoom. Thanks Kevin, I’ll let you know how it goes (and if the client likes it, I’ll post the finished results later on).
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
well I get no errors, but there is no drawing going on. I soloed the layer doing the drawing (takes like 10 seconds to render a frame) and checked before and after the marker (marker does trigger the move), but no drawing going on. The brush postion sits at the center of the comp. Any thoughts?
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
The second expression didn’t work. I changed the name to the name of the layer that contains the first expression and made sure everything’s written correctly, but still no go. Thanks for your input Kevin. I appreciate your helping out on this.
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj