[Thomas English]

You are probably right with regards to reading for comprehension. After another night I am now getting fantastic keys but I still have not fully understood the B- Matte. I would also love to find a way to choke the AE color dif. keyer so I can hard comp and soft comp it better.

Anyhow, thanks for your help.

http://www.thomasenglish.co.uk
http://www.studio.pplmedia.com

[Thomas English]

Thanks Bob, essentially that is my plan and workflow.

I have an hour off rubbish footage intermingled with a few lovely shots.

I extract the shots one by one and lay them together in the timeline.

I media manage export a copy of that timeline into a new project. It splits all these clips into seperate clips.

In my new project I rename each of these clips and in comments I put in the keywords. I then media manage export this timeline AGAIN (this is so I have the new clip names on the medias clips).

In my new project timeline I export an EDL and export the timeline to tape.

I then reprocess manually my EDL into a spreadsheet so that I can easily batch digitize any chosen clip back into any NLE. The spreadsheet can be searched using FIND or put into a database.

I also have all the clips in a folder nicely labelled up to tally with my spreadsheet.

Phew… its gonna be a lot of work.

[url=”https://www.thomasenglish.co.uk”]www.thomasenglish.co.uk[/url]
[url=”https://www.studio.pplmedia.com”]PPL Media[/url]

[Thomas English]

Yes Dave, you are a great help are’nt you. As I said in a previous post I have read the AE help and it is useless and unclear. Is it not bleeding obvious that the tutorial is about core mattes and edge mattes. Is there much point in you responding simply to condescend me if you have not used the function in years.

It talks about using the white dropper on the Matte without explaining which Mattes and it fails to clarify which “white” dropper.

To clarify, the white dropper referred to in the tutorial is the lined white dropper and the white dropper stuck in between the previews is simply a duplicate of the colour key white dropper.

The AE colour difference keyer seems to work by inverting our image in the colour channel chosen (matte A) where we set our Partial A in black by using the black dropper. We use this on the lightest point because we are looking for the brightest black to scale down.

The AE keyer seems to also take the red channel and make a luminence from that (matte B). Where we also choose the darkest post on the screen with our black eye dropper to scale up our chosen red luma matte.

You can scale each individual matte (a or b) by using the black and white matte outs. the matte B is basically a highlight matte so don’t expect the world from it.

The keyer then adds them together (screen blended) on the final matte. We can the scale our matte down to 0 or up to 1.0 using the matte in black or matte in white at the bottom. If you scale it too hard then you get uglier edges. If your doing a soft comp (edge comp) don’t scale it too much and if your doing a hard comp (core) scale it hard. Thats if your just using this keyer rather than hard comping with a chromo keyer a la tutorial.

So far this has taken me a while to work out. If anyone has any more tips I would be grateful.

Thankyou

http://www.thomasenglish.co.uk

[Thomas English]

off course it is.

No, I find the help file NO USE at all. I can use the black dropper to drop on the lightest part of the A matte and then the darkest part of B matte. But using the white dropper really is getting me nowhere. I have more luck with the dropper with a line through it but that makes my edges far too hard. Matte in black and matte in white give me a nice bit of control. But I would love to know the correct useage of setting my white points with the white dropper and what the dropper with a line through its real purpose is?

http://www.thomasenglish.co.uk

[Thomas English]

Thankyou Bob, your probably right. I am currently manually going through hundreds of entries as Steve says. It works but it ain’t great.

I am SO surprised that there is no easy way to turn an EDL into a batch import as this would be the easiest way. Say we had a finished project and its EDL, if I wanted to RE digitise that finished project clip by clip from its finished version with each clip as a seperate batch.

http://www.thomasenglish.co.uk

[Thomas English]

I mean… How do I turn an EDL into a Batch capture list?

http://www.thomasenglish.co.uk

[Thomas English]

Off course… thankyou… this is a manual way and it will work. I am bad on excel.

I have the issue now that any words in my export EDL now take up individual fields. I can change the clip name to “Cowes_week” instead of “cowes week” so it goes into one nice field. I can make my comments fields as comma seperated with no spaces “girl,boat,wind” and that should go into one field. I am stuck though with the computer generated ones like “Bars and Tone” I suppose I can change them as well.

I suppose your right, a little program to intelligently find my fields would have to be designed by PERL or something. I just wonder, this problem must be age old in the world of editing.. taking an EDL and making it into a USABLE excel speadsheet without having to spend hours cutting and pasting fields later. I wonder if there is anything out there?