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Thank you.

This was driving me nuts.

I like all my numbers to make sense.

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After Effects > Preferences > Import

Set import time to whatever time you choose or length of comp.

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Yeah. It doesn’t seem to matter.

If I shrink or choke the matte it just gets smaller, but the edge keeps the same “super black” outline of the black shirt.

Here’s what it looks like. https://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/FileSharing.woa/wa/Green_Screen_Composite_(0_00_03_27).psd.psd-binhex.hqx?a=downloadFile&user=pquade&path=.Pictures/Green%20Screen%20Composite%20(0%3B00%3B03%3B27).psd

Like I said, hair looks fine, shirt, not so much.

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I guess it all depends on how “realistic” vs “stylized” you want to make the glass sphere.

Quick, cheap and easy in Zawwerks would be to;

Import a suitable map of the earth into the timeline and turn off its visibility.
Create a solid layer in After Effects and apply the Invigorator effect to it.
A dialog box will appear; make a spherical primative.
Assign the map layer to one of the Layer Maps.
Apply one of the glass presets to the sphere.
Replace the color of the glass preset with the layer map of the map of the earth.

This will give you a “nice” but stylized glass sphere.

You may also want to import and replace the reflaction map of the glass with whatever footage you’re using as a background that the shpere is going to sit on top of. The “stock” reflaction map is just a high contrast series of swirls and replacing that will make the sphere look like it’s reflecting its surrounding better.

If your After Effect artist has worked with Zax before, this should be fairly trivial. If not, there might be a bit of a learning curve, but shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to figure out.

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Probably the very simplist way to do it would be in Zaxwerk Invigorator.

https://zaxwerks.com/invigorator_pro/index.shtml

Almost trivial really. The most difficult part is finding the map you’d want to use as the surface, but after that, like I said, trivial.

If you need a walk through, lemme know.

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Coincidentally (well maybe not because the question does pop up kinda often) I’m in the process of writing a tutorial on this for yet another user I just turned on to Invigorator.

When I finish it I’ll put up on the web and link it here.

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