[Steve Bentley]

If you select the render settings for each cued item you can change the time span settings to custom and then choose your render “area”.

[Steve Bentley]

So then tie the position attribute to the slider and key frame the slider putting the keyframes you need on the slider only with the same values and at the same time as they were for position. Then you can use the slider anywhere else (but it will deposit a keyframe when you do)

[Steve Bentley]

So are you needing something like: if (time ==X) { use slider value} else {use the value of the keyframes}

[Steve Bentley]

Do you need to comp in 32 bit?

[Steve Bentley]

I’m surprised Peder wouldn’t have implemented it as you suggest Walter. There is a new update out today but alas no fix for this particular problem (pun intended).

[Steve Bentley]

The cow isn’t letting me see the pictures up close – whats that tag on each of your sphere objects? Your objects are collapsed so thats good but the tag may be showing you something in C4D that the OBJ exporter can’t emulate.

[Steve Bentley]

I’m not clear on what you are after but this might help. I take it you want to keep the keyframes where they are but change the values. You can just double click on each of the keyframes you want to change and enter new values. They won’t move in time or change their ease type.

[Steve Bentley]

Once you have made your text, select that layer and then draw a path with sufficient handles so you can animate it to both the beginning shape and the end shape. Inside the text parameters you can now select this path and the text will “stick” to the path and take on its shape. You will also have a new “mask” attributes in the text layer and you can animate the path as you would any mask. The text will cling to the path as it animates.

[Steve Bentley]

I’m not sure how a “fast” lens will help with uneven lighting. Uneven is uneven and opening up your fstop (in other words: a faster lens) will make the dark spots brighter but will also make the bright spots even brighter and the lighting will still be uneven.
Color correcting the screen color (punching it up) before keying is also a no-no. Any time you color correct something you are throwing information away. Look at the the histogram of any image. Now color correct that image. Look at the histogram again. You will notice gaps where information, (color information) is now missing and the smooth transitions from one color to another are now steppy.
Back in the optical days we had to hit a specific color of screen to make the chemical process of the film work. But these days you can key off any color. The saturation of the color and the differences between the screen color and everything else are what’s important, not the actual color itself.

That shimmer you are seeing is digital noise. This is probably caused by the compression of the footage either in the camera or when it was compressed after the camera (to make it a manageable file size to send). It could also be noise from the camera’s chip. I will concede a faster lens can help the noise problem out a little: when a CCD doesn’t have enough light work with it injects voltage in to the chip and you get more noise – a gopro camera does a beautiful job in full sun but looks noisy noisy noisy at night. So a faster lens will let more light in. But in a green screen scenario you should have more than enough light to work with.

Always key with as uncompressed footage as you can. HD (in 8bit) is 186 mega bytes per second. If you are using H264 you are, at best, probably running around 20 mega bits per second. That’s a factor of about 70! That’s a huge amount of information that has been lost. And most of that lost info is going to be the subtle stuff that you need to separate the hair from the green screen.

But not all cameras shoot uncompressed (or have interchangeable lenses) sooo.
Key what you can and then compress the key a little further and use a dechatter effect to help out (if needed). The goal on this first layer is to create a smooth edges key (as in: doesn’t chatter over time). This won’t let the fine wispy hairs through but it will keep the edge from shimmering. It will look like a helmet head key from a B grade scifi movie.
Now on another layer do a rough garbage matte that just lets you see the edge of the hair but not the core of the person and overlaps the compressed key you did in the last step. Don’t use a key puller effect on this garbage matte layer but do use a key color suppressor, so you end up with colored hair tips on gray. Color correct this layer to lighten the gray and then overlay this layer on the rest of the comp with a “darker color” blend function. (or you can crush this layer even further to make a matte for the hair and pass an uncolorcorrected hair layer through this matte.)
You can also remove the color from this hair tip layer when you start shifting levels around. Using extreme curves or levels on an image with color creates all sorts of noise, where doing the same on a grayscale image does not. With subtle little things like hair tips, surprisingly, they don’t always need to be in color, or you can tint them after the fact. (when we used to do photo retouching by hand, small imperfections were always done with gray scale paints, never color. The eye better at discerning brightness than color so things like hair tips aren’t noticed if they are the right brightness but not in color.)

[Steve Bentley]

I think the problem is that scaling is an exponential process (scale something by 200% and the shape becomes 4 times the area, scale by 400% it becomes 16 times the area)
And when you do that over time the speed of the scaling appears to change speed.
So as the object scales up you have to slow that scaling down so that it matches the speed of the incoming footage that is just starting its scale.