Spencer Tweed
2
After Effects Coins
2
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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I use Misfire vignette all the time and love it! In CC there is the new CC Vignette tool which is pretty close, just make sure to set “Pin Highlights” to 100.
Otherwise a good ol adjustment layer, oval mask, LOTS of feather and curves does the trick.
Don’t use “Multiply” because that will dirty your whites – which is definitely NOT what misfire vignette does.
– Spencer
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Haha isn’t that annoying! That’s why it’s important to isolate your problem before you try to fix it I guess 😉 I didn’t think to check the player but of course that makes sense.
– Spencer
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Hey man, hopefully this is somewhat helpful for you. I’ve seen this with various codecs/settings, particularly on a Mac (I haven’t worked on Mac for several years but I used to see this back in the day). I’m pretty sure it comes down to codecs, particularly with quicktimes.
As a test try just rending to a .png sequence in AE and skip Media Encoder. That will tell you if it is a codec thing (.png’s have never failed me) and from there you can see if it is on After Effect’s side or Media Encoder’s.
The one other area that I see this ALL the time is when your render gets converted to REC.709 without you knowing it. If you don’t know that I’m talking about basically the broadcast world doesn’t actually work in the 0-255 color space that After Effects (RGB or sRGB) works in, they work in 16-235 or so (don’t remember the exact numbers at the moment) and so if you render to a codec or color space that is in 709 it will compact the whole value range, lifting the blacks slightly and darkening the whites down a pinch (much like what you see here). Again rendering to an image sequence out of AE should help you out here, then you just need to find the best way to convert that sequence or check your output settings for the video file.
– Spencer
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It depends what you want to put out there and how featured your window is. I’ve gotten away with making sure your blue screen is as far away from the window as possible and than adding some tracking markers in a few horizontal rows (try black gaff tape, or anything else that will be nice and visible in camera but not too large on screen). Depending on the shot you might not need much parallax and just tracking the points could be enough. Keeping your blue screen far away also minimizes spill on your set.
As an additional suggestion make sure you actually have glass or plexi in there – you can use the real reflections to your advantage and key through them with what we call a “soft matte” (basically just don’t key your footage all the way through, but spill suppress the hell out of it).
If the window is close to camera and your steadicam is going all over the place then you will need to do a 3D track as the other guys have suggested. For this I still suggest putting your blue screen as far back as you can, then add a few c-stands with bright tape or trackers on the ends of them at different depths outside your window (assuming the window is quite large in frame) this can help with your track if you don’t mind the additional roto/paint cleanup you’ll have to do.
Hope some of that helps! It would be good to see a still.
– Spencer
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Sorry, got a little distracted. Here’s the FPS feature and while I was in there I noticed something was messed up with “Skip existing” so I fixed that up:
9726_stsmartimportv1.2.jsx.zip
– Spencer
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Thanks man, enjoy using it! I think I could add the FPS option pretty easily. I like the idea of a batch import-and-replace for whenever you get a new take and just need to update the renders – I’ll put that on the list and see how I can best implement it.
Its funny, in looking at the code there really isn’t much there – just about 175 lines (including a lot of comments and blank space) but this was by far the most mind-twisting script I’ve made. It all started when I found the free Smart Import script that ships with with AE and asked myself “what exactly does that do??” After trying it out on a bunch of sequences I still couldn’t figure out what the heck this script was for, so I opened up the code and realized that it actually did a lot of what I needed – but for some reason it looks like Adobe never quite finished it or something. In a mad frustration-driven code-frenzy I made this in 3 days while also comping about 10 hours a day and finished it just in time for another big project!
I don’t want to charge for my coding because I’m not a programmer, I’m a compositor. If I were to charge then I’d have to think about actually testing things out, providing support and fixing bugs! I just code what I need 😉
– Spencer
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Have you tried just running it with both on? I’ve got 2 cards in my workstation and it works fine. They’re both NVIDIA though so that might be why.
– Spencer
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Agreed. There’s a good script out there for breaking up text that I’ve used on several lyric videos called “DecomposeText” that might simplify this for you. It’s available for “Name your own price” here: https://aescripts.com/decomposetext/
– Spencer
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The only thing I know of is the “From current time” checkbox in the Preview pane. If you already tried that then make sure you submit a bug report, I’ve heard back on some and their fixes made it into CC2015!
I’m in CS6 and it works fine, not sure about CC though.
– Spencer
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Haha, such is our life I guess!
The rotoscoping would be to fix up any problems. You mentioned a lot of spill in the foreground, which to me usually means that your key isn’t going to be perfect. For example her eyes might reflect some of the green, or if she is wearing glasses those will be a problem, etc. In these cases you can just create a white solid on top of your key (but pre-comp’d in the end) which covers up these holes.
Conversely if there is a bad reflection on your screen, or, lets say, tracking markers on your green you would need to create a black solid to “garbage matte” those out. A keyer will of course never key out a black X or piece of tape, so you need to roto those out with a black solid so they don’t come through the key.
How’s the spill looking?
– Spencer