Jim Mcadory
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I know this is the Premier forum but I just finished an After Effects project that had a lot of badly lit greenscreen shots. A few shots had shadows so deep the area was more of a black-green color. This is what I used to recover all of these ( I am showing all of the steps so it looks like a long process, it is not as this can be done very quickly ).
Selective Color:
On the clip apply the “Selective Color” effect. With the effect, set the “Colors” control to “green”. Move the cyan to 100, move the magenta to –100, move the yellow and black to 100. Note the yellow and black sometimes work better with a lesser value. This will level out the green quite a bit if not completely.
KeyLight:
Apply the “Keylight” effect. With the Color dropper tool select a color closest to a person in the shot and that closely represents the average green (not the brightest and not the darkest) and click. This should give you a pretty good key to start with.
For the next few steps I like to switch the “View” control from “Final Result” to “Screen Matte”. This changes the display to black and white where black will be transparent, white will be opaque and grey is in between. The next few steps are to change the grey areas to either black or white.
Twirl down the “Screen Matte” options. Start with increasing the “Clip White” values which will quickly reduce/remove the grey areas. Watch detail areas like hair closely as this can clip them as well. If you still have grey then try bringing the “Clip Black” down.
The “Screen Shrink/grow” and “Screen softness” can be used to fine tune the key. These controls are especially helpful if you have a small amount of green fringe showing on the people.
Finally if there are still black/grey spots showing in areas that should be fully opaque (white areas) use the “Despot Black” to change black to white. I have not used “Despot White” very much but it changes white to black.
Reset the “View” to “Final Result”.
Create a new solid layer and set it’s color as desired. Move below the original clip.
Hope this helps.
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I have used the Write-on effect for this but I find I like the Stroked Path better. Here are the detailed steps I used to animate a line on a map:
Add a Shape layer and select it.
- On the toolbar:
Select the Pen tool. and to the right side of the tool bar
Set the Fill Color to NONE
Set the Stroke to be a solid color, this will be the color of your dots.
Set the Stroke width, 10 is a good starting point.
Enable the RotoBezier option. - Hover the mouse pointer over the map at the starting point for the line, it should be a Pen shape. Click to set the starting point and then move the mouse to the next map position and click. Do this until the line you wish the path to follow is complete.
Twirl down the Shape layer and then “Contents” and then the “Shape 1” and finally the “Stroke 1”
- Set the color for the line and width desired.
- If you want dashes rather than a solid line: (1) Twirl down the “Dashes” control and adjust the size of the Dash and (2) “Line Cap” and “Line Join” offer options on the look of the dashes.
To animate the line:
- Click the “Add” button on the “Contents” line and select “Trim Paths”
- Twirl down “Trim Paths 1”
- Make sure the Current Time Indicator is at the beginning of the clip
- Click the stopwatch of the “End” control to begin keyframes and set the value to 0%.
- Move the current time indicator to the end of the clip and set the value of the
- “end” control to 100%.
- To control how fast the animation moves to specific points within the clip, add a keyframe at the desired point and set the “End” value so as to move the dotted line to that point. There is a little t
rial and error with this but it gives you a very high level of control and is worth effort.
- On the toolbar:
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I should have added that you can exclude the hand in mocha if it is partially blocking the area you are tracking. There is a rather long tutorial on mamoworld.com that covers this:
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I agree with Darby, I did one of these not long ago and because the phone was rotating (with lots of glare) as well as moving forward I could not get a good track with any of the AE/Mocha tools. I was able to get a partial track with mocha but had to finish it with manual tracking. I also had to work with the director to re-think the effect and went with a partial screen effect rather than a full screen replacement. The partial screen help hide the fact that I could never get a steady track in the time I had to work with the clip.
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I recently replaced my older dual xeon (4 core) computer with an i7-3930 cpu and 64gb ram which ended my long coffee breaks for rendering. At this level the bottleneck in processing speed seems to be the HDD rather than CPU/memory. With AE rendering somewhat complex stuff I never see the CPU’s maxed out and the memory usage typically is well below what I thought it would be. The i7 processor family will show up as 12 cpu’s and the most I have seen really busy is 4 or 5.
The 3970 you are considering is faster than my 3930 but I built my pc with an ASUS Sabertooth motherboard that allows me to easily overclock if I need more performance-which I don’t! I do miss my extended coffee breaks but otherwise I am quite happy with the change.
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If you go with an external audio device I would really consider the new Tascam DR-60D which is designed to fit under a DSLR camera. Many of the mixers/preamps/recorders on the market were designed for larger video cameras and hanging these on a lightweight DSLR camera like the GH2/3 works but it can be awkward at times.
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I do something like what you are looking for. I have a few base VFX projects, with multiple comps per project. I simply import the base AE project(s) into my new project and I can then select anything from the base project. Importing a project is just like importing any other asset other than when you import a project you get all of it’s assets and the pre-comps of the project. The imported project loads as a single asset with a folder structure that allows you access any of the base projects assets.
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I watched the output process from AE for an mp4 with no audio and it also starts as an m4v but at the end of the render it is renamed to mp4. Not sure why AE and ME have a slightly different process.
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Ok, by watching the output of the ME render process for an mp4 file it is clear that ME is firat creating an h.264 blu-ray file set ( which is a m4v and acc file ) and once the video and audio files are rendered it will combine the files to a single mp4 in the final step. In your case you are disabling the audio file so the process has nothing to merge so it just leaves the m4v file.
I used you settings and only got an m4v file but once I enabled the audio output I got an mp4 file.
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My guess is that one of the option settings is causing the switch. I did find that if you change the Multiplexer option to “None” rather than the default of “MP4”, the result will be an M4V output (the option is found on the video format button, multiplexer tab).
I don’t claim to be an expert on all of the differences between an m4v and mp4 but what what I have seen an mp4 file always has the audio multiplexed and an m4v does not.
If this is not the cause, would you post all of your settings so we can try to duplicate and locate the source.