[Jim Arco]

Ted,

Thanks for your thoughts. Getting identical images is certainly one of the problems. The current budget doesn’t allow renting an Alexa or a RED – think 2 DSLRs and a beam splitter.

This is one of those what-would-happen-if projects. We’re getting good results merging matching frames in Photoshop. I just would like to simplify the process and was hoping AE already had a ‘merge to HDR’ command or work-around built into it.

[Jim Arco]

Well, you didn’t mention any time/money budget.

How about a behind-the-scenes / what-it-took-to-put-this-conference-together video?

Or a spoof of a current television series with the conference presenters as the “stars?” (Photoshop World this year did “Project Photoshop” that looked surprizingly similar to “Project Runway.”) Or an old movie instead of current TV?

Or a music video with conference presenters?

Jim

[Jim Arco]

Chris,

As always, your projects amaze me. I just spent a few minutes with this one on some noisy DV footage and also on some AVCHD files that a friend just brought me. As advertised, it takes out much of the blockyness and even improves the graininess in the low-light DV footage.

You asked for comments: The “black mask” control seems very sensitive. With a setting of 100, I get strange artifacts in the shadows and with 99.99, I do not see them. Either I’m not understanding it’s purpose, or you might want to add a multiplication factor to the control.

Thanks for your continuuing work to help us improve footage!

Jim

[Jim Arco]

Thanks Todd for the quick response. Looking back at my post, I guess my lack of sleep at the time helped make my post sound a bit surly – that wasn’t my intent.

After a little sleep, I think I was trying to say that I wish more effects and tools would be seamless across Adobe products. I also wish that I could tweak my PPro project in AE, then later make minor changes in PPro without having to start over in AE.

I’ll try to clarify what I’m after and submit a feature request in the next few days.

Jim

[Jim Arco]

Any sort of frame-by-frame retouching will be very time-intensive to get the frames to match.

Andrew Kramer has a tutorial here on the COW
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/blemish_removal/video-tutorial.php
that has some good ideas in it. He uses the remove grain filter rather than blurring. You might also consider lowering the contrast with curves adjustment for a more subtle effect.

I haven’t used them, but there are plug-ins designed to facilitate skin retouching. One of them is called (something like) Beauty Box, but I would think there are others.

Jim

[Jim Arco]

Kent,

(I’m not in front of my CS4 box at the moment.)

I also sometimes use Photoshop when I have difficult video. You can render (and also export) an image sequence from AE. PSD is one of the choices, but I’m not sure if it there is a choice to export a merged layer or all layers.

You could also render each layer separately as PSD or TIF sequence from AE, then import each into PS. A bit clumsy, but it should work.

PS does not have some things that are available in AE – ie adjustment layers. Not sure how those would appear once you got to AE.

Jim

[Jim Arco]

Jim,

I haven’t found a way to work with Lab color space inside of After Effects. However, you can open your video in Photoshop, convert to Lab, and apply filters. After you save the PSD, you can import it to AE and the filtering done in Photoshop remains intact. (No need to change back to rgb.)

This works great for those times you need to make broad changes to luminance or to color. Also, little surface blur applied to the a and b channels can be used to get rid of some types of noise. If you modify the Photoshop file, you need to right-click on the footage and reload it in AE.

Jim

[Jim Arco]

Owen,

You might have better luck getting a response if you posted an image (using IMAGE UPLOAD icon), instead of requiring us to download, unzip, and display the pic.

Jim

[Jim Arco]

I’m not at the workstation with AE right now, but Walter is right. No leaves on the trees, overcast grey skies, and people wearing long pants and jackets mean that the best you’re likely to get is “someone painted the dormant winter grass a weird shade of green.” It will be tough to sell this as anything but winter. Maybe you could take some of the blue out of the scene, but you’d also need to paint in some leafy green leaves on trees and shrubs, make the skies blue and maybe add some colorful flowers.

You’ll either need to find an editorial option or plan to reshoot.

[Jim Arco]

Can you post a still?

As much as we like to think grass is a deep green, it usually contains a lot of yellow.

Try to find an image with some grass in the color you want and then duplicate that hue/saturation/lightness. Also look for other things in the scene that might not be correct for the season. (Are there leaves on the trees? Sun at a low angle?)

Jim