Kevin Camp
Forum Replies Created
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you can find andrew kramer’s (the videocopilot) tutorials here too, and at his website. in addition, aharon robinowitz has a good tutorial on creating super tight junk mattes… don’t know what a super tight junk matte is? check out his tutorial, it can be really useful.
you can find both andrew and aharon in the ae forum as forum leaders.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Barend Onneweer has a few tutorials about keying dv and setting up chroma shoots. you’ll find them here, towards the bottom:
you can find a lot of other good ae tutorials at the cow, browse the ae tutorials or click on some of the forum leader’s pics in this forum and in the ae forum.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
the problem isn’t your keying as much as it your shot. from the looks of it, i don’t think your green is very close to a chroma green and even then it’s not lit very well. you’ll need to get much more even lighting on your background.
it looks like the foreground and background are lit with the same lights. you will need to light the background separately from the foreground.
additionally your subject is too close to the green screen, that will always make it hard to get a good key even with a good chroma (or rgb) green and good lighting.
there are some good tutorials here on keying, but i think you’ll want to find some basics on shooting a chroma wall shot.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
if you have your ps path as a layer vector mask on one layer and import that into ae as a compostion, you will get a comp with two layers, one of which will have a mask applied.
you will be able to use most of the mask properties, like feather, opacity and expansion. and at least some of the effects that can utilize masks, like stroke, will recognize the ps vector mask. however, you can’t manipulate the vector mask points in ae.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
i can’t think of a plugin that can do something like that… maybe there is another way? what exactly are you trying to create?
you mentioned an audio wave… i think you can create a sin wave in several ways. aharon robinowitz has a good tutorial on this (he doesn’t use the audio waveform effect), and if you didn’t have the audio to generate his effect, you could link the expressions to a slider for control.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
i’ve actually never used an avi in ae, but i found i can export them via the file menu, but can’t render them from render queue. i do wonder what codec they might have used in the avi that seems to be requiring so much processing to decode…
next time you might ask for an image sequence, most software that can spit out a media file will also export an image sequence. i always dislike having to jump through too many hoops to get a project done.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
adaptive resolution should be on by default…. if your nvidia card is supported by ae’s opengl requirements, you may also want to try turning on opengl accelerated previews. opengl can be enabled in the same preview pref. you can toggle between adaptive and opengl in the preview window, there is a small icon on the bottom-right of the preview window that allows you to switch rendering. if open gl is working for you, you can use it to render your final output as well, by setting it in the render settings (it’s a check box). you can find a list of accelerated features and effects in the help menu (or manual), search opengl.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
i assume you used the numbers effect, and set keyframes for you count down, starting at 10 on frame 0 and ending on 0 at the 10 second mark.
try setting the value of 10 to 10.49. i think what is happening is that 10 is counting down is decimals and getting rounded to the nearest number so half way between 10 and 9 it hits 9.49 and rounds down.
you could also try an expression that would only generate whole numbers. or, add 1 second to your comp, start at 11 and back time your countdown layer 15 frames. or, you could use hold keys frames at each second and enter a value.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
well, ae is not a realtime app. everything is rendered. you can preview in realtime by hitting the zero on the #s keypad. this will render a ram preview, which, once rendered, will play in realtime.
you can get better performance by adjusting the preview settings to a smaller scale (50%, 25% etc) and the quality (half, quarter…), generally if you cut he scale to 50%, also set the quality to half… if you set the scale to 25%, set the quality to quarter… also make sure that adaptive resolution is on in the preview prefs.
1gb ram is not a lot of ram for ae, your operating system alone will need some of that, probably around 128-256mb. remember that one frame of standard def video is 1mb, so ae will eat up ram quickly.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
if you want shadows ‘real’ shadows, you will need a light and you will need to make sure that the cast shadows property is on for the light and the layers that will cast the shadows. you will also need to make sure that the properties accepts shadows and accepts lights are on for your 3d layers (this is ususally default).
adding lights will change the look of your images, and you may need to adjust many of the material options to get the look you want. you may also be able to create some simple shading effects by just using some ramps and trying a few different blending modes.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW