Mstleger
Forum Replies Created
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hey, lighting in general is a field in itself. To orient yourself, set up a table in a room with a few objects on it, then take three lights and place them around the table. Turn all but one off, then start placing your lights, and turning them on. Play with the distance and direction of the lights. Do a web search for “three point lighting” which, in film, is a good beginning lighting scheme.
Remember, in After Effects, lighting is affecting a 2d plane, so objects have attached shadows they cast upon themselves. Also, don’t use too many lights- there is a limit to what can be believable depending on the scene, plus, they take too damn long to render.
Also, the material attributes of the objects will help get that look you are trying to achieve. -
Jeff’s right- most keying involves rotoscoping with loose masks- a “procedural” key, if you will. I usually make a garbage matte to isolate my subject, and make one really general key, which acts as a “fill.” Then, make a key that works on the edges. Multiple instances of this last key will be needed, because the hair will surely need a different key than the leg or the hand. Approach a greenscreen shot as a lot of work (because it is!). There is usually no perfect “one-button” approach, unless the person was filmed 50 feet away from the screen, on film, and the lighting is perfect. This never happens. To supplement the key and start the composite, I will sometimes soften parts of the matte with a choker (preferably not an AE choker, but 3rd party) and create light wraps from the background after color correcting my foreground. Hope this helps. Oh yeah, you can always shoot a clean plate of the green screen to try to pull a difference matte, if all else fails. Good luck.
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YES- you can’t go wrong with the books by Trish and Chris Meyers. I still refer to them very often. Also, if you can find a copy, “Photoshop Channel Chops” by Bert Monroy, David Biedney, and some other dude. It’s really a comprehensive book about how color channels are affected by operations, and how to manipulate them to pull mattes, etc. It was written for version 4.0 of photoshop, but still applies today.
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Hmm… Maybe you could save out the color channels of the cmyk file as black and white images, then use them as mattes in AE, applied to colored solids in ae. Set them to “color” mode, over an rgb version of the image, which you will need for the luminance. I dunno, just guessing here. Personally, I would just find some acceptable way of converting the image to RGB before importing.
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camera tip: I’ve found it useful to parent the camera to a null node, and use the null’s controls. Sometimes, I’ll parent the scene to a null and move it around the camera, just leaving the camera still.
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dang, just thought- you can right click or control click the layer, a contextual menu will open up, then scroll down to the effects menu without pusing the mouse to the top of the screen. Yep thats all the ways I can think of.
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Oh yeah, command-5 will open up the window with a searchable list of effects
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I sometimes keep an invisible layer that contains often used plugins in the comp- just copy and paste the effect from one layer to the other, if there are oft-used custom settings, save them out as animation presets, as mentioned above.
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Usually, I would either copy the layers and paste them back in the comp you want them to be in, or I would make the needed adjustments in the precomp. Also, there is the option of collapsing transformations, which is often usefull when pre-comping 3d layers.
This issue is the sole reason I find myself using shake a little more often, although I’m still a little faster working in AE. -
community college fine arts degree, plus a BFA in Computer Art at School of Visual Arts, NYC. Oh, but I learn more at work than anywhere else. Nothing is more educational than working on a compositing team, sending shots back and forth, etc.
Communal problem solving is second to none.