[Nik Yordanov]

It’s not for a paid client. I had an idea for a personal project, to track the camera, isolate the astronaut and move him into Blender to put him in a spaceship corridor, walking towards a shuttle. But I didn’t have the time lately to finish that keying succesfully. I want to be able to handle more complex shots and cases, so I decided to take on this one, but I guess it’s not worth the time to do it frame by frame with masking.

[Nik Yordanov]

I did try including rotobrush, but it doesn’t do a good job here. There are tiny spaces between his legs that open and close, plus that brightness in the suit screws up with the rotobrush tracking I guess, so the tracking is ok in one moment, and the next it mixes up a lot, I can’t control it. If it isn’t doable with a technique using the settings of the software, I guess the only way to make it in After Effects is doing some frame by frame masking, which is very tedious

[Nik Yordanov]

Hi John and thanks for joining the post.

I tried, but the result wasn’t very different:

[Nik Yordanov]

Hey Walter,

Ahh, you’re right, I was so silly not to think about this. I also didn’t quite accurately do the screenshot, because my pre-comped layer that consists of an image background and a rotoscoped video (from a green screen) was turned to a 3D layer, but as you say, it has no depth, as it’s not really 3D. I did open another project that I made entirely with Element 3D, where I have an hdr environment and a few 3D models, and that’s where I’m able to see everything as I’d like from any camera viewer mode.

Thank you

[Nik Yordanov]

Hey, I found out another way to create a black-white matte copy – by using the Boris FX’s Sapphire Tint effect. I then used other effects such as levels, key light, advanced spill suppressor, simple choker, and set the copy comp as a luma matte to cut out the object. However, I have grey residues that I just can’t remove. I’m uploading a screen recording to the current state again. Did I mess something in the workflow? Or is there a way to remove that grey residue from this point on?

Adobe-After-Effects-2024-D__After-Effects_After-Effects-Projects_Austronaut_Astronaut-New-Try.aep-_-2024-02-26-17-44-35.mp4 14 MB MPEG-4 - Click to view

• Copy Download Link

[Nik Yordanov]

Hi Andy,

Thank you for joining the thread. I tried to do what you said, but didn’t end up with a black and white matte on the pre comp. Most likely I’m doing something wrong. I duplicated the clip and added Set Channels, then selected the duplicated clips as the source for the red channel. Then I duplicated again and selected the 3rd clip as source for the blue channel (I returned the red channel to “none”). So the only clip that doesn’t have the set channels effect is the original. I precomposed either the 2 duplicates or all 3 clips and and tried to apply keylight, but still nothing different. I’m uploading a screen recording video of this. Could you please tell me where I’ve gone wrong?

AE-recording.mp4 9 MB MPEG-4 - Click to view

• Copy Download Link

[Nik Yordanov]

Unfortunately, color correcting didn’t help that much either. I did bring more saturation and lightness to the shot. It also introduced more brightness to the subject, but I didn’t change his colors. I can’t remove the shadows on the green screen that much in the HSL section, because that starts eating away the shadows of the subject too. Then, when I apply the keylight effect and sample the green, I again end up with a semi-transparent subject. The only setting I can change to bring back 100% opaqueness is “clip white”, but that starts to add back the background in grey color. I tried to do a garbage mask around the subject and add the keylight, but it’s still the same thing. I’m attaching screenshots below.

I guess I hit a dead end with this one 🙁

[Nik Yordanov]

Hi Tom,

Thank you for this detailed input! I’ll try to follow the workaround you suggest and I’ll update on this.

I usually use AE for all visual effects-related tasks, and use Premiere for plain video/sound editing and color grading. I know that green screen keying is best done in Nuke, but after spending 1.5 years in AE doing compositing and effects creation, and seeing that I still have a lot to practice with it until I’m comfortable with dealing with all sorts of cases, I don’t see myself switching to Nuke anytime soon.

[Nik Yordanov]

Thank you so much, Walter! Now everything was imported just fine. Actually, I never looked into this, because the archive I downloaded had a separate folder for MAC OS, but I now see there are the same files in both folders.

[Nik Yordanov]

Hi Hector,

Thank you for joining the thread. I watched this tutorial a few days ago. I’ve basically watched all tutorials on Youtube (at least I think I have) on working with exr files in AE, but haven’t seen something that reflects on difficulties with the import of such an exr sequence. I also think that it wouldn’t make sense to convert these into another format, as I won’t be able to do what I want to do in the first place.