[Matthew Woods]

Do you have, or can you get access to Trapcode 3d stroke?
It can do a very nice tapered stroke for your arrow tail.

My favorite method of doing arrows is to use a text layer with some sort of > character as the arrowhead. You have zillions of fonts to choose from.

I then attach the text to a path, adjust the baseline of my > so it is in the middle of the path, then stroke the path either with the built in stroke effect, or Trapcode 3d stroke as the arrow tail.

You can then animate the margin on the arrowhead to have it follow the path, and animate the start and end values of your stroke effect to have the tail follow the path.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Have you tried Premiere’s chroma key? It has fewer options for tuning, but I have been really impressed with it and find it often gives better results than Keylight. I’d love to see it added to AE as an alternative to keylight.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

It looks like ObviousFX is still around. Have you downloaded the latest version, and/or contacted their support?

Sounds like a nifty plugin. I’m still on CS6 so I’ll have to give it a try.
Their reverse telecine plugin sounds really handy too.

Thanks,

As for your question about growing the alpha, have you tried the built in matte choker and simple choker tools? They can be set to a negative value to expand the alpha.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Can you render a single frame? If the answer is “yes” you can try setting AE to purge every frame during make movie using After Effects’ “Secret” preferences.

To access the secret preferences, press up, down, up, down, left, right….

err wrong secret.

To access the secret preferences, hold down shift while choosing any preference from the preference menu.
You should see a secret pane at the bottom.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Have you tried the Paint Bucket effect? Its real quick, and I think it works well with things like this. I’d use a copy of your sand layer set to multiply to preserve detail in the sand grain edges, and a choked paint bucket key for your bright filled main images.

Here is an example project. Link it to the files you posted.
7545_sandfishtest.aep.zip

Nice fish animation!

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Hi Joe, I am aware of AE’s bitmap focus and effects, however AE has very good and powerful vector mask and shape and text tools as well. I am also aware of AE’s swf export, but in this case I am wanting to go to an illustrator or eps file for output. (I am designing a gobo pattern for a theatrical light).

In this case all I want to do is the equivalent of stacking a bunch of masks on a single black solid with different add/subtract/exclude modes. I am finding it very hard to do this in illustrator, and can’t find a good tutorial (possibly because all of my search terminology is AE based). Every time I need to use illustrator for anything more than file conversion, it ends up taking me several hours to figure how to accomplish a task I could have done in 5 minutes with masks in AE. I don’t need illustrator often enough to invest the time to become proficient in it, and every time I return to it (usually once every other year) I have forgotten how to do things.

I know AE is not the tool traditionally used for this, but I often find myself using AE instead of photoshop for raster still image creation. Since I know and love AE’s vector mask tools, I would love to be able to use it for vector image creation as well. Barring that, I was hoping someone in the AE community would know of an Illustrator alternative that is more intuitive than illustrator for someone proficient in AE.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Try checking the “force alphabetical” option when you import your sequence.

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Try checking “Force alphabetical order” when importing your image sequence. That should ignore the missing frames and treat it as a 16 frame image sequence.

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Thanks for the ROI tip Walter. When did they add that feature? Very handy.

Anyway, it apparently does work with Element, and it allows me to ram preview the area at full resolution! Unfortunately, when it comes to rendering from the render queue the option to render just the ROI area is under output module’s “Crop to ROI” where it apparently tries to render the full frame first then crop it. (this causes a crash)

I found a tip on VideoCopilot’s element forums that when working with large element layers to drop multisampling down to 2 (from default 8) and increase supersampling to compensate. This seems to work allowing me to render a full frame and hasn’t sacrificed much in visual quality with the imagery I’m using.

Using ROI is speeding up my previews though. Thanks for calling my attention to this handy feature.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

That wobbly surface tension edge of the frame looks to me to be overly aggressive keylight matte cleanup. The shrink/expand matte options in keylight often do this sort of thing. Best to try to get the best key you can before using those cleanup options. You can try adjusting the color that you are keying. Sometimes it works better to just move it manually around the color picker and try to find a color that gives you the best key rather than try to sample it. For poor greenscreens, I sometimes ditch keylight altogether. I personally hate the rotobrush. I find it takes forever, and it often has bad chatter. I prefer traditional rotoscoping over using it. If you can find a setting that will give you a good edge, but has holes in the figure, you could animate a garbage matte to fill those holes.

Here are alternative tricks I’ve come up with for pulling tough keys. Sometimes they work.

1: Try Premiere. I have enormous respect for Premiere’s Ultra Key. It often pulls miraculous keys that I wouldn’t think possible. Doesn’t always work. Keylight gives you more options, but some footage keys better in keylight, some in ultra key. I wish the Adobe team would include Ultra Key in AE as an alternative keyer.

2: Try the paint bucket effect. I have sometimes had good results with the paint bucket effect applied to an unused corner of the badly lit greenscreen. Sometimes you need several instances of the effect in different corners. When this works, its fantastic. You can even do everything with one effect, check Invert Fill, and set the blending mode to stencil alpha. This trick works well for people shot on black or white which don’t key out well with keylight which assumes a colored screen.

3: Try multiple instances of keylight sampling different greens from different sections of the poorly lit screen. Use less aggressive matte cleanup on your keylight, and set the view setting to “intermediate” on early instances to avoid color correcting the greens that you are wanting to key out.

4: If the camera is locked, and you have a clean frame with the actor not in the shot, (or if you can make such a frame). Sometimes a difference matte works.

5: I have sometimes gotten good keys by duplicating the layer, and applying shift channels to the top layer. I set all the channels to full on, then cycle the alpha channel through the different channels till I find the one with the most contrast. I then use the levels effect (on the alpha channel) to increase that contrast. I then use that as a track matte for my color layer.

Just some things to try. I hope one of them helps.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com