[Kraig Winterbottom]

Yeah I was thinking of checking out AEscripts.

I actually did manage to get some half decent results from the workflow I described in my last post once I split the view into two panels. I painted on a duplicate of the plate and had the duplicate set as the alpha track matte for the CG, then split the view into two panels like someone else suggested earlier and set paint channel to alpha. That way so long as I’m painting on the plate itself, I had the correct reference for the matter and I could also immediately see the CG being erased in the locked comp panel because it was already set up as the track matte for the CG.

Would be better if I could see it updating interactively (rather than when you let go of the mouse), as well as not having to look back and forth between the two panels to keep track of whether on not I’ve “coloured outside the lines” but it worked better than I expected ☺

[Kraig Winterbottom]

[Michael Szalapski] “First, thank you for sharing information! A lot of people just ask the question without giving specs (like version of AE) and it makes diagnosing much more difficult! ☺”

Cheers dude – totally agree ☺

Yeah I gave it a shot on a different drive as well but still to no avail.

One thing that has transpired since while trying to work it out is I’ve tried some of the same footage in a brand new project file and I didn’t have the same issue so it looks like something causing a bug in my project. I’ve had this happen on a few projects now but it’s not something that happens every time but when it does strike it ends up sticking around.

Now I have a thread to pull on I’m going to try and copy everything into a new project file and see if that fixes it when I take a break and if it still persists I’m going to go through and make sure I don’t have any scripts running that might be causing the problem (it’s a huge project that was handed over to me from another artist so I’ll have to do some digging).

Cheers for your response dude, I’ll report back in a bet when I’ve managed to find out more 🙂

[Kraig Winterbottom]

Just ran into this myself. Doing a job in After Effects for the first time in a while and desperately missing rotopaint in Nuke. Some objects are just so much easier to quickly paint the alpha instead of messing around with loads of fiddly mask vertices. My only real solution so far is to paint on the video where I know I want a matte, then copy and paste the paint effect to the proper layers (or duplicate the video with paint and use track mattes to use it as the alpha).