[Simon Ubsdell]

This one is a real puzzle to me.

I am on a Mac and I cannot see this among the Fusion tools and a search of the manuals returns nothing about it. Presumably it’s a PC only thing?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

It sounds as though your have Auto Proxy turned on, which will momentarily show you a draft version of what you are doing.

Sometimes that’s fine, but a lot of the time it’s very annoying.

To turn it off, hit the APrx button down at the bottom left of the interface, just next to HiQ and MB.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Bob Woodhead] “So Motion rasterizes groups when filters, masks, etc are applied.”

This is not correct. It is not rasterising. Here’s a simple test to prove it.

Create some very small text. Apply a filter to the enclosing group. Scale the group as large as you want. You will not see any degradation of the text.

What does rasterise a group is hitting the Fixed Resolution button.

What does happen however is that applying filters to a group changes the overall Blend Mode to Normal as against the default of Pass Through.

So for example, if you have a layer in your group that is set to Screen and you apply a filter to the group, you will need to reset the Blend Mode of the group itself to Screen.

Edit: A few filters do indeed rasterise the group, but the majority do not. The point remains that it’s not “rasterising” that causes the Blend Mode to change from Pass Through to Normal.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

AE blurs picutres if they don’t stay on integer positions

This is exactly what you would expect to happen and it’s nothing to do with how Ae works specifically.

Your image is a grid of pixels each with its own defined position. If you move an object by a whole number of pixels it will be able to occupy a position on the grid that is equivalent to its original position and hence will look just as sharp.

If you move it by fractions of a pixel then the resulting pixel is being interpolated – it’s neither in one grid position or another. And that’s why it will look nasty.

Note that the same thing applies to rotation, which will always result in interpolated pixels.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Can you post more details of how you are building your flow, preferably with a screenshot? You shouldn’t be seeing this …

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Michael McCune] “Simon; are you saying that the Planar Tracker works as many tracking points”

The planar tracker “does what it says on the tin” – it tracks planes and areas that approximate close enough to planes for it not to make too much difference.

The result it outputs is a planar transform (essentially position, rotation, scale, but also shear and perspective) for the plane is has tracked, so in many ways you could think of it as a fancy four-point tracker. The difference is that you don’t need to define specific track points yourself which can often be very hard to do – instead the tracker identifies many points within the area you define and creates the result from those many points.

The most obvious use is the stuff that everybody immediately thinks of, namely screen or billboard replacements and so on. But in fact you can do a lot more.

If you can identify areas in your image that are close enough to planes for the tracker to be able to interpret them adequately, then you can use it for example for facial touch-up, where although the area in question isn’t flat like a plane, it’s good enough.

And to answer your question after all that, it can also be used for rotoscoping if again you can identify areas that are sufficiently like planes that the tracker can yield useful results. What the tracker does not do is track the control points of a rotoshape. As explained above, it outputs a planar transformation for an entire image based on how it calculates the plane as having moved. You can apply that planar transform to your rotoshape and it will animate the rotoshape accordingly.

So what it allows you to do is simplify a lot of the process of animating a rotoshape, but it doesn’t do the whole job. To reiterate, it animates the overall transform, not the individual control points.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

While you’re absolute right to point out the amazingness of Mocha Pro, is it the answer to the OP’s question?

He wants a matte for his foreground, not to remove his foreground to create a clean plate of the background.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

The way to do this is with a Difference Matte, but be warned it’s generally a rather ugly result.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

If you could post a still or even better a short section of the clip in question, it would be easier to answer your question.

Polar bears have fur, and fur is going to make this potentially quite tricky. There might be a procedural method that would help with extracting a matte, but since you mention a chain link fence that’s probably out of the question here. That means it’s a time-consuming rotoscope job. Although Fusion 9’s new planar tracker can make this quite a bit easier.

But it all depends on the shot itself and also how perfect you want the result.

EDIT: If your shot is locked off you might be able to try using a Difference Keyer, though the results are often pretty rough. But it might get you 80% of the way and you can clean up the rest.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Thanks, Mike. I’m glad to know it was interesting to you.

This is indeed a very useful technique that has many uses and can be a real life saver for fixing problem edges of all kinds.

One of the things that I have been seeing a lot is that lower end cameras create problematic fringing in the red channel that can make a real mess of the key. This technique is a great way of solving this problem.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki