Michael Hancock
Forum Replies Created
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I’m not familiar with the “matrox color replace” plugin, but I am familiar with 3prongs ColorFix. It works like this:
You can select up to 4 different shades of the color you’re wanting to change/tweak. These are the “Old” colors. You can select to “Join Old” where it uses the different shades you chose to figure out what other colors fall in the ranges between them, and it includes those colors as well. Great for areas that fall into shadows, for highlights, etc…
You can then view the mask of that color and adjust the luma range, chroma range, tolerance, the blur and opacity of the mask. You can invert the mask, too, with box cropping (although you can feather the edges of the crop).
Next you can select to key the color you chose, or colorize it. If you colorize it, use Luma, Hue, and Saturation to change the color. Once you’re done with all of that, you can do more color corrections within the plugin.
How well the shot works will depend on your footage. If you’re wanting to change a red car on a red background to a blue car on a red background, you’re going to be out of luck. However, if you have a red car on a blue background and you want it to be a green car on a blue blackground, it’ll probably work magic for you. I’ve used it to change the color of a dress–the talent was shot on green screen, didn’t like the color of dress she was wearing (light pink), so we changed it to lavender. If you didn’t see the original footage you’d swear it was a lavender dress all along.
You can go to http://www.3prong.com and download the demo. Install it, try it, if you like it and it works for your needs, order it. They’ll send you the unlock code and the watermark it renders with will disappear. Very simple.
Good luck. If you have more questions about it, post here and we’ll help.
Michael.
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Buy an HP xw8400. It’s a certified system for Avid, which means you’ll get help if you need it, and it’s a beast so you shouldn’t have problems with your compositing. Go to http://www.avid.com and check out the products page for system specs.
If you do go with a non-certified system–people have had trouble with AMD, Avid is not 64 bit and who know when it will be–stay away from ATI video cards. nVidia only. Good luck!
Michael.
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Render your comp out as a png sequence, straight alpha, and render it to fields if you’re Avid guy isn’t in a progressive project. Avid loves PNG–cleanest alpha you can get, and might fix the shaking issue too, but that sounds like a field problem, as someone already mentioned.
When your Avid guys imports he has to know what field order you rendered in and match it to his import settings. Also, what version of Avid is your guy running? There was a bug in the last few releases where you needed to render your AE comp upper field first, even if you were working in a lower field first project. Avid interpreted it correctly and you didn’t have the shake.
Give us some more info and we’ll see if we can get you going.
Michael.
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OR:
Select the layer in your comp. Select the layer you want to replace it with in the project window.
On a PC hit Alt + Ctrl + /
On a Mac hit Command + Option + /
It will replace the clip in your composition with the clip you selected in the project window. Much faster than dragging with a mouse.
I found it under Keyboard Shortcut in the help menu (F1).
Michael.
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I think the new driver should help. Avid is very picky about what drivers you use, and having a black screen on playback is usually indicative of running an uncertified card or the wrong driver–let us know if this solves it.
Good luck on getting the service agreement too!
Michael.
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What video card do you have, and what driver is installed for that card?
Michael.
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MMB–middle mouse button.
LMB–left mouse button.
Those are my guesses!
Michael.
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I wouldn’t call it operator error–you got the warning, you should have had a chance to switch bins–instead, Avid crashed and lost your work. Avid deserves the blame for this one!
Honestly, it’s a shame that only 99 titles can be held in a bin. The project I mentioned in my last post had several hundred titles, plus revisions. It ended up being a lot of bins, and it would have been nice to keep them all in one bin for easy searching.
Best of luck on the project man.
Michael.
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It’s in the hamburger/fast menu on your timeline–lower left hand corner.
It’s not under the normal File-Edit-Bin-Clip menus.
The default shortcut is Ctrl+] and Ctrl+[ for More and Less Detail.
Michael.
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Can you export a quicktime reference and take it into Compressor, if it’s all installed on one system? I don’t know, but you should try it. I’m guessing it will work.
HOWEVER…
Quicktime 7.1.6 isn’t currently certified with Avid. It may work–it will probably cause problems. You can try it, then roll back if it doesn’t work.
Also, exporting a quicktime or quicktime reference from Avid will strip the timecode–I don’t know if 7.1.6 will fix this, but I doubt it.
Good luck!
Michael.