[Steve Roberts]

You’ve just learned a difficult lesson. The background must be evenly lit and bright enough (but not too bright) to be seen by the keying software as a saturated green (or blue). If it’s too dark or too bright, it loses saturation and starts to look like areas in the talent.

That said … if you have access to the Pro verion or Production bundle, try using the Keylight effect — it’s a separate install on the AE CD. If, however, you only have the standard version with Color Key, all is not lost.
The most important keying is done around the edges of the talent. Draw masks called “garbage mattes” roughly around the talent, hopefully cutting out the worst of the background. Once you’ve done that, apply color key and click on one color in the remaining background. Apply it again, clicking on another color. Keep doing that until the area around the talent is keyed out.

If that doesn’t work, you have two recourses:

1. Reshoot.
2. Rotoscope. This is where you draw masks on the footage that follow the talent. It can be a royal pain in the behind. Do it once and you’ll never light greenscreen badly again. 😉

There are rotoscoping tips on the COW: use the search function at top left. I’ll just add that when drawing masks, look for extremes of movement or shape, and place your mask shape keyframes there. Let AE interpolate between.

Anybody else?

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

[Andrew Yoole] “If you interpret field order and render frames, you’ll actually just remove one field from the source footage (which is harsh deinterlacing).”

Technically, AE only does that if the layer is set to draft quality. At high quality, AE interpolates between the frames. Admittedly, it isn’t smart enough to avoid doing this in areas where there is no motion. RevisionFx’s Fieldskit plugin is supposed to do this intelligently.

Note: sometimes a 1-pixel vertical blur (directional blur or fast blur) can soften fine lines to avoid flickering … but you need to interpret the footage as fields to make that work.

Why 24 fps?
What was your final frame size?
What was your final goal? DVD?
Did you render to fields? Why? (You don’t have to, but if you do, get the field order right.)

You should also get Trish & Chris Meyer’s books, Creating Motion Graphics. They’re must-haves.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

First, search the AE help for “solo”. 🙂

To “pre-render” a layer, solo it, and render the comp. In the output module, there should be a “post-render action” button. You should choose “import”. Check the help to explain the other options. When done, you can drag the rendered movie into the comp just over the source layer that you just rendered, and hide the original source layer. (Rather than delete the source layer, I usually do that, just to keep the original layer around in case I need to change it and re-render.)

Regarding your other question, AE is slowed down by the size of the frame or source frames that it is rendering at that moment. It doesn’t care how many frames come before or after. In other words, if you were going to render 10 seconds, trimming (not “cropping”) the source footage to 10 seconds wouldn’t speed up AE.

However … there may be a slight disk-reading speed advantage to clearing unnecessary items off the drive containing sources for the comp, so AE doesn’t have to look at as many files or frames when looking for the source footage. But that would be minimal.

To find out where your “make movie” rendering bottleneck is, hit the little “current render details” triangle in the render queue when rendering. If you see the words “retrieving frame” onscreen longer than a quick flash, AE is slowed down when reading the source files. The longer you see a message in the details, the more likely it is that you’re looking at your bottleneck.

By the way, don’t leave the render details visible for too long — writing all those messages can slow down your render. 🙂

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

You might want to use the phrase “refresh the comp window”, since “render” in the AE context, generally refers to rendering a still or movie to a file, not to the screen. 🙂

Regarding your question, from AE’s point of view, when part of the frame has changed, the entire frame has changed and needs to be refreshed.

To speed up workflow on a heavy comp, it’s a good idea to solo the layer that you’re working on. Only make visible what you really need to see at that time.
… or you could pre-render and import the layers that you’ve finished.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Yes, it used to be part of the Final Effects Complete Suite, which went for around $1000, if I recall. Now it’s part of AE, and for the small price of an upgrade to 6.5, it can be yours … with a ton of other goodies and improvements.

“Best … upgrade … ever.”

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

If you have 6.5, it’s part of the separate Cycore install from the AE CD. Otherwise, you’re stuck.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Heh — thanks, Chris, but I think Tom’s technique trumped mine in that thread. 🙂

SR

[Steve Roberts]

Some have found that working in a 16-bit project can help things even when rendering to 8-bit. I haven’t found this yet, but then I haven’t done enough testing.

However … 16-bit really makes a difference when you render to a 16-bit codec such as Microcosm, or a 10-bit codec such as Decklink. Then you play out your 10-bit decklink file to DigiBeta or analog betaSP. Those designers who make beautiful noiseless gradients generally output from Digital Voodoo or Decklink to DigiBeta.

You should look to the weakest link in the chain, though. In your case, it’s DV. You can work in 16-bit as much as you want, but then the DV codec will knock everything down to 8-bit. No, DV does not support anything better than 8-bit.

You might have to add noise, as some of the other threads suggest.

BTW, there’s no such thing as uncompressed DV. Some cards support “lossless” codecs, which compress in a manner similar to ZIP, but they are generally Motion-JPEG, not DV.

DV is not good for motion graphics. It was designed for real-world shooting. As a result, you need to get used to compromises when outputting to DV. Adding noise to your gradients is one of them. Check the threads on banding.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Search the COW on “banding”. There are a few workarounds, but you won’t get it looking perfect with those codecs.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Nope.

A reference movie is basically a bit of code that says “play this much of the original from here to here, then from here to here, and so on”. It works best with cuts-only movies. Presumably, the rendered scenes get played between the reference scenes.

AE renders every frame, always. It always makes a new, standalone movie.

Steve