[Steve Roberts]

Yikes. Trees. Bad idea, but let’s see what we can do.

Here’s what I imagine:
layer 1 (top): the large foliage at left-to-center of screen. Use keying to pull out the dark tree trunks, masking to kill everything to the right of the right trunk.
layer 2: tree trunks. Fill in the tree trunks with a dark solid, or patches of tree trunk copied from elsewhere. Now here’s the problem: with what are you going to fill the areas to the left of the tree trunks once layer 1 is removed? I would grab sky from another shot and dupe the grass under the talent and move it to the left. I wouldn’t try to add any trees there unless it looked bare.
layer 3: talent: I hate diff mattes (they rarely work in real life) so I’d roto the talent — but then again, maybe a diff matte would work around the body, but you’d probably have to roto his head and shoulders.
4. Background: Once you remove the tree trunks, how would you fill in the area behind? You’ve got to find trees from somewhere else because you can’t create the edges of the existing BG trees by cloning. You have to create trees, with shape and all — not just a tiled texture. You’re making trees.

If I were given this shot, I’d convince the DP to do this if the talent (and bluescreen) was unavailable for a reshoot:
1. keep the talent and roto the BG out
2. shoot grass for the talent to stand on, with background trees but no foreground trees and bring him in over that layer
3. shoot various foreground trees with sky BG for keying out
… of course, the lighting would have to match. 🙂
4. Comp the talent, BG and new FG trees in layers in AE.

Remember: these jobs are more than just removal, there’s also filling in. Ask yourself how much needs to be filled in, and with what. How much needs to be created? The “kid stays in the picture” animated 2.5D stills effect requires limited cloning around edges due to reveals due to movement. This is different, no?

Anyway, hope that helps.

Tip: it sometimes helps to look at these scenarios with the right eye closed. This flattens things and gives a graphic perspective, which is all the camera sees. Keeping both eyes open and seeing in 3D might fool us into imagining that the layers actually exist in the camera when of course, they don’t, and the job is harder than we think.

[Steve Roberts]

So if the client can play a Blu-Ray disc, work and render at 1920×1080 (square pixels), encode to the appropriate codec for Blu-Ray, make the disc and test it.

If they can’t play a Blu-Ray disc, you have to go with DVD, which is 720×480.

[Steve Roberts]

I don’t know if we’re all on the same page … I think Corey’s talking about a “heat sensitive Predator look”, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermography

If so, yeah, I’d mess around with Colorama. Anybody else?

[Steve Roberts]

If it’s playing from a hard drive, and the monitor is 1920×1080 (HD), try making the comp (and render) 1920×1080. Then compress it (try h.264) and play it back from the hard drive. If it stutters, lower the data rate until it plays smoothly.

The pixellation could be a combination of two things: low quality/data rate, or the enlargement (scaling up) of the video. If it were 720×480 and your desktop were 1920×1080, then it’s being scaled up. You can’t avoid the scaling up with DVD, since it has to be 720×480. However, if you’re playing from the hard drive, try 1920×1080 as I suggested, and the scaling up won’t be a concern.

[Steve Roberts]

We’re talking about output modules, since your Render Settings would be Best.

[Kate Koyama] “Say what would be the output for:

– playing the video from a laptop that is hooked to the tv screen”

Try Quicktime Photo-JPEG, or H.264.

“- playing the video from a burned DVD”

If you’re NTSC (not PAL) your movie must be 720×480 (probably 16:9 widescreen), 23.976 or 29.97 fps. Render from AE to a high-quality codec such as Animation, then compress to MPEG-2 using something like Compressor or a DVD-authoring app. You then have to author the DVD so it plays in a way that suits the presentation. Imagine a non-technical person inserting the DVD into the drive, then what happens?

“- other options???”

I’d go with DVD. Don’t forget to test the final product.

[Steve Roberts]

Ignore the screen. What device will play the animation?
– hard drive?
– DVD?
– other?

[Steve Roberts]

Hey, no worries. Hope you solve the problem …

[Steve Roberts]

Thanks for posting the solution, Casey.

Sometimes I drag a mysterious clip into AE, interpret it different ways and read the clip’s info in the project window to figure out what’s going on with a clip. This is sometimes necessary because editing apps aren’t quite as … objective … about a clip’s characteristics.

There are at least three apps to use when checking clips: QT Player, AE, and an editing app. When things go weird, it’s good to know what each of those will tell you about the clip.

……

Maybe the COW should sell “I’m ordered, not dominant” t-shirts. Dave would buy one. I’d buy the other. 🙂

[Steve Roberts]

R-click on the last keyframe, select keyframe interpolation>easy ease in. If you want to adjust the deceleration, use the keyframe’s graph.

[Steve Roberts]

The problem is … AE can’t capture footage. You need to use an editing app to capture/ingest the footage first.

Now if you could capture the footage, you could import the digital file into AE and study it, but you have to capture it first in another app. Sorry.