[John Mcmullin]

Thanks Dave. I was hoping you wouldn’t say that. I can’t reshoot as it’s not my production. If worst comes to the worst I think a re-position and resize and a dissolve and darkening the table will have to suffice. If I roto the objects on the table then I’ll lose all the shadows as well.

I was surprised though that the warp stabilize didn’t work. It’s been behaving very strangely in correcting two shots that are almost exactly the same. I was wondering if I’d missed a trick in how I am using it.

John

[John Mcmullin]

That great. Everything should work fine then, fingers crossed.

Thanks for your help. I couldn’t find an answer to that question anywhere online.

Best wishes,

John McMullin

[John Mcmullin]

I agree, something so basic shouldn’t require a work around. I wish Avid would rewrite their effects interface. I feel they’re stuck with the way they decided to do it 20 years ago.

But another workaround is to use the paint effect and a matte key:

1: Layer your background on v1 and your intended foreground on v2

2: drop a paint effect on v3

3: In paint, draw your shape in black around the part of the image you want to key over the background.

4. Still in the same paint effect, draw a white rectangle over the whole image then send it backwards, behind the white shape. You’ll then have an image you can use as a matte key.

5. Alt drag a matte key effect onto the paint effect on v3 to nest it.

6. Alter the position properties of the matte key. You will now see the foreground layer moving without affecting the background.

[John Mcmullin]

Thanks Simon.

I’m sure that would have worked for me. Means doing a double flop but that’s no hardship.

I’m still a bit confused though by the nesting principle in Motion. Sometimes seems hard to treat groups as a flattened file.

Thanks again, John

[John Mcmullin]

Thanks Bouke. Got stuck into editing it already but will try to persuade the boss to pay for it.

Great that there’s something out there.

[John Mcmullin]

Well thanks,

I guess you’re referring to the FCP crash as the broken main system.

It seems to crash when under RAM pressure. It’s a large sequence in HD. Not doing it all the time, just 3 or four times a day, which I would say is more or less par for the course in FCP with a heavy project in HD. But maybe not.

I was hoping someone would have seen the autosave problem before. We’re actually delivering the programme tomorrow. Be good to know for the future in any case. If we remember to save often it’s not so bad.

John

[John Mcmullin]

We ended up downloading Photoshop CS4 Extended and importing the video.

It’s possible to use Photoshop actions to define an area using the Photoshop patch tool and automatically advance through the frames patching as it goes.

It works pretty well if that area of the image is generally soft focus or similar in colour. Can go wrong if there’s a lot of detail in that area. If it goes wrong, which it does fairly often, you have to step through frame by frame.

Generally it’s been a time killer this process and none too exciting but the results are seamless.

John

[John Mcmullin]

I appear to have sorted this by nesting everything into a new group and making sure it was 2D. I then made the top of the the group 3D. So all the camera calculations are simple.

I guess that was the logical way to do it.

[John Mcmullin]

Thanks Stephen,

That did the trick. It looks good now.

Thanks greatly.

John