[Jeff Rouric]

Thanks, and wait I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. What exactly do you want me to do? Is this a test to see if it’s the smoothcam causing it?

So you want me to pick another clip that doesn’t have smoothcam on it and try that out, and then export that clip with smoothcam on it and use the exported clip instead?

Also, is there a way to link a clip to a source so that if you add a filter to the source video, it will add that filter to every instance that that clip is used in the timeline? Besides adding the filter to the master clip in the browser, exporting, and replacing the file that all the timeline clips link to outside FCP, and then reconnecting to the edited master clip, that is?

Thanks!

[Jeff Rouric]

Arg…DVCPRO HD 720p60 codec….and sequence matched that…

I know that converting EVERYTHING to ProRes422 before editing is the proper thing to do (but to be honest I’m not sure what the best way to do that is), but I’ve worked many other projects with the same codec without converting and had no problems like this. Converting makes every clip bigger and then I’ll have 2 copies of footage and have to keep the DVCPro around just in case. I don’t have that kind of storage though. On a higher quality project I would invest the time and money but these are not worth it I think, just as long as it works.

It’s really that important huh? I mean if that’s the only way to prevent it I’d rather just fix it here and there the way I described when it happens on these. That’ll take 5-10 annoying minutes as opposed to a day or two of converting over 400 clips.

But please explain

Thanks

Also, I only noticed today that on the current project this happened to, it happened near a part that was stabilized using the SmoothCam filter. Everything was normal after you passed that clip. Perhaps that may have something to do with it? I don’t remember if that was a common factor of the others that this happened to. To be clear, it only happened to one multiclip, but since I’d made multiples edits before, it became multiple clips. And the set of clips from that multiclip ended on a different clip, which was stabilized.

[Jeff Rouric]

Wait a minute, I’m an idiot. In my hours of frustration and doing tests with the color channels of different sources, I failed to realize that white is a pure combination of ALL colors, including blue.

And that the exact same effect is achieved with “Reveal Original Image” (on stroke options) + Invert Channels set to Alpha.

[Jeff Rouric]

Hey John I’m trying out something with the stroke effect similar to what we’ve done, here

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/1049627

If this works I’d think it would be a faster, smoother way to paint alpha data.

[Jeff Rouric]

Yeah man that looks great! I had no idea you could animate eraser and paint like that (to tween), I just started drawing stroke after stroke and it looked bad. Also, when I did it, I got 100ish different paint stroke layers, when you did it, you got 4. How’d you do that?

[Jeff Rouric]

Hey John, thanks, I hadn’t even tried Luma Key! I didn’t realize what it was til today…I took pieces of your method and pieces of my convoluted method and ended up with a niceish result, see what you think! Also thanks so much for providing a project file with your answer.

Basically now that I knew what a Luma Key was I thought “Well, what can I do to make the blue stand out brighter or darker from everything else?” so I tried decoloring everything but the blue, then boosting the blue, and changing the blue to white, and using that as a matte” you’ll see.

You think that’s the limits of the video? (without rotoscoping, I really don’t want to rotoscope, and this is more an experiment to not rotoscope anyway.)

(…..actually, is there a way to add alpha? Like, paint it on? Like say the effect didn’t cover the whole wire, it missed a few spots in different frames. Instead of masking and rotoscoping the whole wire that way, could I just see those frames and expand the alpha matte in just that frame using paint or something?)

7305_7304glowjefftry.aep.zip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CofhpmPb8-Y&feature=youtu.be

[Jeff Rouric]

YES. Yes this is EXACTLY what I needed. Thank you so much you’ve made this work!

[Jeff Rouric]

Lovely. That’s been there the whole time. Whole thing gets brought in as one intact sequence, some effects work as well. Neat and laid out in order. No worries about handles. No redoing clips to bring them in…

I’m going to go leave a note for future me and then kill myself 😛

Thanks!

And Dave, yeah this client only gave me h.264 footage to work with, no raws.

[Jeff Rouric]

Hey man, I just noticed one major flaw to this plan…

The trial version of those plugins includes a red X on the layer that I let slide because I thought it was just some weird preview thing, and also I was really tired last night. Turns out it actually renders out, so I can’t use these plugins.

So basically, have I reached the limit of what can done to this bad footage without 3rd party software? Should I just start masking and frame by frame rotoscoping away? Again, this doesn’t have to look great, just passable.

[Jeff Rouric]

Oooo thanks, I downloaded the trial and this seems really powerful, but I have no idea how to use this. I tried Primatte, and read through the manual, can’t understand much, but I followed the tutorial, and it looks so much better than keylight/alpha matting from keylight because it’s not “bubbling and popping”, but there’s a lot more green fringe. How do I get rid of that? Is there a choker/shrinker option I’m missing?

Also, how come even through the matte reads as black in some areas, there’s still something like noise there in the Comp view?