Michael Tiemann
Forum Replies Created
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Please tell me how to access mask shape keyframes! Thatxs really what I want. I don’t see how mask expansion does what i want. Its for featering, not actual scaling.
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
The first bug they listed as fixed is one I reported. Yay!
• Title Tool crashes when copy and pasting
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
I am unhappy to report that Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017 seems to run completely out of gas when I increase the mask size to 12K x 12K. The time it takes to render the video preview jumps from next-to-nothing to 30 minutes for a 20 second video clip. And the alpha computation changes tremendously (probably because software and hardware render are that different, and I’ve really never noticed because the idea of using software-only render for RED media is such a ridiculous proposition.
More and more it looks to me like the answer is “Use AE. Premiere Pro is not designed to support features like resolution-independent, animatable masks.”
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
Here’s a YouTube video showing my attempts to use an 8K x 8K mask. The first two examples work, and the third fails. But really, they all fail, because it should be possible to animate the shape of a mask in PPro, as was the case with the garbage matte.
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
For now I’ve made an 8192×8192 matte. When I scale to 30% size it gives me the right sized porthold and when I scale it to 360% size (a 12x total zoom) the porthole expands to reveal the underlying image. But…God help me when I want to render UHD-sized images with clean matte edges after scaling up, instead of down!
The beauty of the garbage matte was that one could simply animate the locations of the handles and it would shrink, expand, or move however was needed. What an amazing new world we live in where such basic functionality disappears with an “upgrade”.
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
Continuing my search for the answer to my question, I found this:
“You’ll need to nest the time remapped clip and then apply other effects and keyframes to that nested sequence.”
To which I say: what kind of abstraction were they smoking when they decided (1) Time Remapping was such a special function it could only be used when *nested*, and (2) why cannot Premiere Pro bother to give a warning that keyframe and time remapping are mutually exclusive functions in a single clip? (And perhaps provide a hint that nesting the clip will sufficiently separate these two time-based effects so that they will not conflict.)
Ugh.
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
Ivan said: Check that the keyframes in the Effect Controls panel are linear and not Bezier or Continuous Bezier.
I did make them linear, but this changed nothing. Why would Adobe offer Bezier curves that provide smooth interpolation between keyframes, but then forget to connect what the Effects window is promising (i.e., a given keyframe value at a given frame) to the actual program it’s rendering? No, they do not appear to have specifically botched Bezier curves. They have botched *all* curves.
Ivan asked: Did you drag/reposition the video in the program window at any point?
Never intentionally. I have now figured out the precise way of enabling the feature of dragging the video in the program window to create keyframes, by (1) selecting the clip into which the keyframes are to be placed, and (2) selecting the little transform widget in the Effects Controls. What a horrible piece of UI they have created! If the whole idea of WYSIWYG when you manipulate the program window, why force me to grovel the timeline in order to select the clip that happens to be visible in the Program window? And then why force me into an entirely different panel in order to enable the effect? If setting keyframes from the program window is so dangerous, why allow it at all? If it’s so logical, why not make a sensible shortcut so I don’t have to visit 3 other windows to get the job done?
But no, I never did move the window in the Program Monitor before my woes began.
Ivan suggests: It would be helpful if you posted a screen capture with the Effect Controls panel, timeline (with video tracks expanded), and Program Monitor.
I have found how to work around the problem, and how to easily reproduce it. It has nothing to do with any of these three things, at least not directly. Time remapping is such a special feature–probably implemented by a team of people who have never written anything before or since for Adobe. When Time Remapping is enabled, the keyframes in the Effects controls seem to be hopelessly misinterpreted. When I slice out video clips that were under the time remapping influence and then use Speed Control directly, it’s a pain, but I can trim the video, shift the keyframes, and everything works as it is supposed to. But when Time Remapping is in play, it appears that the frame numbers fed to the Position parameters (for example) are probably the original frame numbers of the video frames, not logical frame numbers that I or the playhead count along the timeline.
Strange.
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
Could it possibly be that Adobe Premiere Pro doesn’t understand how to do math when there are speed ramps in play? I just noticed that a pair of keyframes I set about 30 frames apart are ramping across the full range in the first five frames. I have a time remapping function of 695%, which, perhaps means that Premiere Pro is counting discarded frames as it tries to do the interpolation. It is almost unbelievable that they could screw this up, because the Position animation area is interpolating the changes to the position parameters exactly as I would expect. It’s just that when the actual values are passed to the transformation window, they are all wrong.
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
I have a question. I seem to have some keyframes that are causing wild things to happen in my Program window, but it is completely non-obvious how to control those keyframes in my Effects Control window. It’s as if there are two kinds of keyframes that both operate on my clip, but I can only control one of them. The other has some random values that are screwing me up, and I cannot figure out how to get rid of them (without deleting the 100+ keyframes I spent all day entering).
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
Ugh! I am now having the same problem, and I think it’s not nearly as easy as you say. Adobe’s keyframe handling code appears to be written by a group of programmers who (1) don’t know each other, and (2) don’t really understand basic concepts of model-view-controller programming. I’m looking at the Position keyframe controller in the Motion part of Video Effects. The position is a two-dimensional parameter, meaning it can vary in terms of X and Y. The display of the keyframe values along the timeline show (and control) only the X parameter.
Something has gotten into my Y parameter that is messing with my image position, but nothing I seem to try exposes where that’s coming from. All I see is the stupid X parameter, and neither a graphic indication nor a textual one that something is funky with the Y parameter.
If only the XML output from Premier Pro could be easily parsed by humans, I might be able to tell what is going on. But now I have to decide whether to manually write down all the keyframes I currently set, delete them all, and try to re-enter, or what.
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/