[Jim Arco]

WOW – Talk about answering the question!

Many thanks, Chris, for taking the time to provide a great template. It will take me a bit to understand what is going on in this project, but I am sure it will be worth every minute.

BTW your Technicolor projects have been very helpful to me. Even though I only occasionally need a technicolor look, I used the many ideas in your templates to develop several templates of my own/ These are used frequently for projects I am working on.

Thanks again.

Jim

[Jim Arco]

Regular (miniDV) video. Import the video into Photoshop; export as TIF sequence; Open TIF sequence as RAW in AE.

This was covered in a tutorial several months ago, and I have been using the technique to improve some REALLY mediocre video.

[Jim Arco]

Thanks Alex.

I hadn’t thought of autosave. (Still, it seems like a real oversight that there is no uncollapse. After all, After Effects knows exactly how the clips are sequenced and trimmed.)

Jim

[Jim Arco]

Last winter, I shot a choir’s Christmas concert in a church that had an uneven mixture of incandescent spots and CFLs. Of course some of the CFLs were old and needed replacing so they were even further off-the-mark than new ones might have been. Complicating it even more were tall windows on either side of the church that had pebbled glass on the lower part and pebbled yellow-orange glass on the upper part.

I could find every sort of light, from very blue to very yellow to very green-spike, directly and indirectly lighting the choir.

Since there was no budget to bring in a lighting truck, I eventually built an adjustment layer in After Effects for each camera angle. The adjustment layers had different areas of color to compensate for the different colors and unevenness in the lighting. I’m just glad I didn’t have any moving camera shots!

The results were pretty good – not my greatest images, but worth every penney they paid for it.

Jim

[Jim Arco]

I haven’t used it, but AE comes with one of Imagineer Systems Products. It’s called Mocha or maybe Mokey?

Imagineer makes tools for creating travelling mattes for objects shot against generic backgrounds. “Mattes are created using the background information and the motion data, allowing you to easily create mattes for objects shot against virtually any background.”

Might be worth a look.

[Jim Arco]

The zooms appear to be done in post-production and cover the cuts between scenes. There is also some masking/feathering where the “cuts” don’t quite match up.

You could probably do something like it yourself by shooting the first part of a scene, moving the camera, then restarting the lip-sync a few seconds earlier when shooting the next ‘scene.’ Then you’d need to piece it all together in post.

That…..and lots and lots of planning.

[Jim Arco]

You can probably fake the missing color channel using one of the channels that IS there.

Photoshop or After Effects will allow you to do this. There’s a recent thread in the AE Forum where strong red lighting yielded an image that effectively only had a red channel.
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/972962

You might want to take a look for some ideas.

It won’t be a simple fix and it probably won’t be an exact match, so you’ll need to decide if the footage is worth the time/effort.

Jim

[Jim Arco]

My experience with CF is that it works on the original footage file. If I apply anything effect/blending mode/etc prior to CF, I may get unpredictable results.

Pre-comping is the rule rather than the exception with any complex combination of CF and some other modifier.

I’m not aware of any option within CF to change this.

[Jim Arco]

I wonder how soon there will be a bird poo plug-in?

I can see it now, “The all new Bird-Poo plug in has selectable bird species and can be tweaked for wind direction and bird flight path. Can also can be used to simulate melted ice-cream, mud drops, and molten volcano drips. Special introductory offer….”

(I’m sorry, but I couldn’t resist.)

[Jim Arco]

To answer your question: I have a workflow I use to get good skin tones (from Mark Dubovoy) and I would also like to be able to use it with RAW files.

“…that would defeat the purpose of Camera Raw…” You make a good point, however. I guess I’ll need to convert from RAW to something else before I do final color correction.