[Mark Andrews]

thanks.

Ive never really considered taking it into an NLE before. I suppose it would save time in the end with the rendering also. In some instances I have other layers effecting the titles like particular or optical flares. But not always.

I’m currious to try and see what Premiere could do for me.

Thanks again.

[Mark Andrews]

Try turning it off. I have found that it causes problems with some (but not all) ELEMENT renders.

-m

[Mark Andrews]

Not sure exactly how to get it to do what you want with that stroke. Are you using the stroke for another purpose also?

Not sure if this helps but you could use a simple stroke on a solid and then use the Stroke effect and animate the start and end points of the stroke. You could probably use that effect on your stroke also really. then set the start point to 100 and the end point to some other percentage based on the length of the stroke.

I’m going to try to include a screenshot of the basic stroke I created with the effect.

[Mark Andrews]

I think with what you have, I would try creating a duplicate of the original image and adjust it with some curves. Boost the green, and adjust the contrast to give yourself the best image possible to pull your key from. Then when you do pull your key, set the output to give you just the matte. that will give you your black and white image you can place over the original layer. Set the original to trackmatte the Luma from your key you made.

Then you can adjust the feathering either by adjusting either the properties of your key, or by applying matte adjustment effects like shrink and grow to your original image. Those effects will help you eat away the edges you have if you still need to.

Light wrap really only is going to help you if you are comping the image on a background. You feed it the background layer and it feathers, blurs and comps some of the background around the edges to blend the two images. You probably want to leave that for the person doing the comp.

some other random thoughts …
Make sure you garbage matte out the areas you don’t need before creating your key.
You can combine multiple mattes into one by precomping them and using blend modes to combine them.
Use multiple methods to get the results you are looking for.

[Mark Andrews]

Do you have Multiprocessing enabled? if so disable that and try it. I’ve had issues with that. In the Memory & Multiprocessing Prefs.

[Mark Andrews]

Using the basic motion tracker, you should be able to stop tracking your shot when the picture cuts to the other shot. Then delete the tracking points you don’t want (if you tracked a few frames past). Apply that to a null object.

Then you can delete the tracking data from the tracked shot. Move down your timeline to the next section you want to track and do the same thing. If you apply that tracking data to the same null object, it will simply add the new tracking data and leave the first data alone. It will interpolate movement between the last of your first track and first frame of your next track. Not sure if that’s a problem for you.

If you want, you could create multiple null objects and adjust their length to the area of the clip your tracking. On a mac you can hit Opt [ or ] to trim your null layer to desired length. If you are tracking 3 sections of video, create 3 null objects. Parent the second to the first and the third to the second. Then parent your face to the first null.

Hope that helps and is kinda what you were looking for.

[Mark Andrews]

You could possibly add a second mask to the adjustment layer and set it to subtract and then animate the second mask according to your desired animation to reveal the glowing area you want. Cycle the animation of the second mask.