[Steve Bentley]

Forgot a step – make sure to apply a HSL filter and desaturate totally before running the levels filter on your matting elements.

Good thought Dave – didn’t think of that myself – you can also use the matte choker with the extract filter to finesse the results.

Another trick we will do is to “bipack” the original or some desaturated version of it. Just do a precomp with two copies of the original “multiplied” on top of each other. This will magnify the density of the non white areas. Then, in the outer comp pull your matte with any of the above suggestions. This of course depends on how white your white is.
Dont hesitate to run a degrain or denoise before any of this. Yes it softens it but that’s not always a bad thing where mattes are concerned. But mostly is smooths things out before you start to crush the levels.

[Steve Bentley]

Re Yosemite – I hear ya. No, it’s win7.

And now that you mention it, I’ll give it a whirl on the mac.

In playing around again I can get different results depending on whether or not I precomp the shot I’m reshaping. But it’s obvious something is wrong – see image.

The green mask is the source and the yellow is the destination. Since the green encompasses the entire image, there should be nothing beyond the border of the yellow mask (except maybe a 1 pixel smear). But you can clearly see the entire right half of the image is being stretched beyond the edge of the frame (and the texture continues so it’s not a smear).
Its almost as if some of the correspondence points are vectoring in the opposite direction.
(and yes I have done them in the same order).

[Steve Bentley]

Instead of fighting with Luma key (especially with something shot on black) we’ll often just take a copy of the footage and crush it with a Levels filter and then either use a slight blur or use the matte choker to smooth it out a little. At least this way you can move the edge of the matte in and out and add as much anti aliasing to the edge as you like.
Then take the original footage and use a luma track matte to pass it through this hi contrast “window”.

[Steve Bentley]

It might cause by where those specific plug-ins sit in the hierarchy of nested comps and other effects. (For the most part) before after effects adds an effect. it “renders” the comp to that point and applys the effect to the render held in memory. Even if the final output comp is HD sized, a larger nested comp with an effect on it could make the memory max out.

It could also be that the plug-in that’s causing the problem cannot render beyond a certain rez and the comp that the effect is within is either too large or generates a temp “render” that is too large due to super sampling required for some other effect or manipulation.

AE has never been stellar at handling memory (after a complex render I have to restart my machine to truly clear the ram, or you can wait a good long time before AE will start up again)

Is there any other info you can provide?

[Steve Bentley]

Sure I get that. (all of this done with double cntrl\) I can only pan around if I’m zoomed in more than 100%. But when at 100% and filled to screen why are there just the few pixels of the chrome around the edges available to pan to? If the stage is 1920 why is there 1926 or so of the interface being made available to the output?
And I can get near the edge and all is well, its only when I’m dragging a mask point. Dragging an image or a solid or an effect “center” near the edge or off the stage doesn’t slip the output at all.

Good tip that. Didn’t think of the double hand tool trick to center. Does the question mark also do the same? (not in front of the system right now). My big issue was I might not see the image shift and i could be working away without knowing I was no longer centered.
At least that trick will get me back to centered so that I can know for sure that my line up matches the final output.

Thanks for that.

[Steve Bentley]

I’m sure I’ve use this before but right now the reset does nothing but bring up the info box (and that’s really annoying if you have the effects tab in the same panel as the info tab)
But the bigger issue is the reset is not working for me.
Have tried in 5.5 and 6.0 as well. (Win7)

[Steve Bentley]

Yes but then you loose the ability to tweak later. The attributes we’re wiggling already have a base set of keyframes on them. Once you “make it so” and commit the script to keyframes at 30fps, you can’t go back.

I supposed I could link other layers with the base key frames to the layer that’s going to wiggle, thereby protecting my hard won animation keyframes, but with the number of layers we’re talking about and each one having it’s own unique path, that immediately doubles the layer count and then it becomes a logistics issue.

And just to quell the next logical idea, the project didn’t warrant programming a particle system.

Thanks for the input guys. Building “down” worked like a charm.

[Steve Bentley]

Right, of course. Thanks guys. I was just hitting duplicate and going to work on the new layer, that of course popped in above the current one, indexing the original up a notch (or down as the case may be).
I’m now working on the old layer and letting each new duplicate layer be,as I already tweaked the motion of it, when it was the original. So my stack is growing downward.

Cheers

[Steve Bentley]

No matter how many splines I add to the daisy chain, I can get it to work and all become one big spline. When trying to figure out how you were orienting them I came up with a configuration where all splines terminated at the same point – a fan if you will. This cannot be made into a single spline (at least without some issues once you start sending something along it) so if that’s what you are doing then yes only the first two will join. But send along some pics if you can so we have a better understanding of what it needs to do.

[Steve Bentley]

Just had a thought. The I way was doing the arcs they all went the same way. But based on your description I have a feeling yours oppose each other. You may have to “reverse” the direction of every other one, so that all splines nodes have the same numbered order. Don’t physically flop the spline, just Structure/Edit Spline/ Reverse Sequence and the join them.