[Roei Tzoref]

[Jack Wilholt] “It also has music so pngs aren’t really a option I guess.”
any of the codecs specified will do. my personal favorites are QT Animation or PNG. Animation – render much faster, but produce a big size file. PNG – render much slower, but will produce a small file size.

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Roei Tzoref]

[Jordan Service] ” But whenever I have a layer with Key light on it, and i use a mask, it gives me back this 1 pixel line through image.”

whenever you have 2 mask’s edges from two layers that are supposed to to line up perfectly and you see the seam – you can use the Alpha Add mode on the upper layer and make it go away. this is because the mask edge is anti aliased and has 50% opacity. 50+50 in opacity is not 100 but 75… the meyers explain it better then me: https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-hidden-gems-weekly-alpha-add-mode/

[Jordan Service] “Also, if the mask is not square it squares off the edges. “

you are probably trying to use the screen matte or combined matte mode while using the mask to create your luma matte. this effect does not allow you to do that but what you can do is set the effect to intermediate matte or result and add a fill effect set to white (to make the alpha white) and if you don’t want it to be on transparent background use a solid composite effect set to black (to have a black background)

Before:

After:

BTW I usually don’t bother with luma mattes with keying and just use the alpha matte. if I want to see how the luma looks I just use the ALT+4 shortcut to view just the Alpha channel in my composition. I would recommend this advanced keying course by mark christiansen especially when dealing with dividing a matte when keying: https://www.lynda.com/After-Effects-tutorials/After-Effects-Compositing-04-Color-Keying/114914-2.html

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Roei Tzoref]

also Quicktime, Jpeg 2000 and I think that’s about it…

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Roei Tzoref]

If your video is intended for further editing – us QT Png RGB+Alpha. It will be much smaller. Where is this video going?

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Roei Tzoref]

I see. you mean in Cinema 4d all is fine but in Ae it messes it up? please share a screenshot of your full Ae interface with the maxon cineware effect in the effects controls in full view so we may look at your settings.

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Roei Tzoref]

you should probably post your question here: https://forums.creativecow.net/cinema4d

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Roei Tzoref]

I agree, this is a new breed.

Thank you, this was fun and I learned something new ?

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Roei Tzoref]

[Mikhail Konovalov] “OK, I’ll capture a video of the whole process and post a public link below. Having been using After Effects since version 4.0 in the late 90’ies, I wouldn’t have missed a checkbox. I import it as still layers, it gets imported as sequences. That’s the problem.”

in your recording indeed the sequence checkbox is unchecked and your layers were imported as psd layers with duration, and not with the sequence Icon like before. this is from your recording:

this is from before:

it’s all the same of course because they do have duration all the same. but in unlike the recording, in the previous screenshot it is psd sequence simply because it has the icon of a sequence is where I am getting at.

[Mikhail Konovalov] “I cannot be correct on that, having never stated it; “
I only meant to acknowledge that there is a problem with layers with a duration even though they are not a sequence in the context of the thread. bad phrasing on my part, I apologize.

[Mikhail Konovalov] ” As it is apparent from the screenshots, the layers’ duration is 2:00 in Photoshop but 5:00 in the After Effects. “
yes, in your screenshots it is 2 seconds in Ps, and 5 seconds in Ae. but the file you uploaded opens in my photoshop 2015.5 like this:

5 seconds. so I have 5 seconds in Ps and 5 seconds in Ae. btw I don’t have a ruler for the time units at the top of the timeline panel.. where do I switch it on?

as for why this is happening where frame layers are imported in limited time… obviously some bug or I suspect that Video Timeline workflows in conjunction with Ae is relatively new and uncharted territory. but we can get by. what about the workarounds I suggested?

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Roei Tzoref]

if you are sure this is not coming from the 3d camera tracker effects (after you tracked you can just turn it off or even delete it), try clearing your cache. edit->preferences->media&disk cache – clear both buttons.

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Roei Tzoref]

[Tero Ahlfors] “They’re going 1000 and up. It’s just showing three numbers.
“

Ah ha 🙂

[Dustin Bremerkamp] “The weird thing is….I opened an auto-save file, and the layers are all there. This will be fine, but its disappointing since I’ve lost some work since my last save.”

a few thoughts:
1. Workflow – this is a staggering number of layers. could this be pushing the limits of the U.I? I don’t know. maybe pre-composing what needs to be pre-composed could help you. you only need to leave all the layers in the same timeline if everything is interacting in the same scene. if this is not the case, you could probably make you timeline much more manageable (and un-buggy perhaps) by pre-composing different scenes of shots. I imagine that navigating through this timeline can be very annoying.

2. Preferences – see if you got hardware acceleration checked in the preferences display option. try checking or unchecking. I would also try to reset your preferences.

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials