[Weston Woodbury]

Ola Luke,

2 things you need to make sure of when exporting DNx with alpha from After Effects:

Inside the DNxHD settings (that’s the “Codec Settings” just below where you pick DNxHD for the Video Codec), make sure Alpha is set to compressed or uncompressed (I haven’t been able to tell the difference) instead of “none”.

Then, Make sure on your “Video Output” that RGB+Alpha is picked on the Channels, and “Trillions of Colors+” is picked on the Depth.

You’ll get alpha come through with those. 709 vs RGB is another matter, that doesn’t deal with whether or not alpha is embedded into the file.

Hope this helps,

Cheers
– wb

– Weston
my letter arrangements: PP CS55 AE MC MBS BMDDR GVE FCP

[Weston Woodbury]

In case anyone’s searching and digs up this thread?:

I’ve since settled on DNxHD for any type of alpha work out of After Effects. It’s seems to be the least problem prone from everything else I’ve tried. It yields great results, actually, quality is fantastic even at some of the lower bitrates.

Only exception is sometimes if it’s a final output deliverable for broadcast equipment, some of that stuff needs image sequences. Both PNG and TGA with alpha seem solid.

Cut and conquer! 🙂

– Weston
my letter arrangements: PP CS55 AE MC MBS BMDDR GVE FCP

[Weston Woodbury]

“I think you are drastically understating the ‘effort’ part of the equation.”

Really? So, two companies that have hundreds of millions (or billions) of dollars in revenue, can’t do what one project is doing open source on basically no funding comparatively, and another project is planning to do after a 30k$ Kickstarter fund? And by that I mean support/port more than 2 platforms–I realize porting something from Linux, to OSX, could possibly be a bit simpler to do. Sorta.

“Avid/Adobe on Linux – unfortunately I can’t see that happening. Too much that would need to be tweaked to bring functionality on par with the other OSes, Apple would have to port Quicktime to Linux (and Quicktime is dead) etc. etc.”

As already pointed out here, DaVinci and Autodesk both figured it out, and surely their video dept. budgets are substantially less than Adobe’s or Avid’s.

“Not saying a Linux port wouldn’t be great, it might be, but it’s a really big effort and wouldn’t make a whole lot of business sense at this point for avid/adobe.”

There’s actually a decent demand, and that’s only absolute enthusiasts. No marketing or awareness at all. $1,250,000 in instant sales isn’t bad for nobody knowing about it.

Add getting the word out there that it’s now supported, onto the scores of professionals hating Windows 8, or those feeling abandoned by Apple but don’t like Windows, and I honestly don’t think it would take long (given our workflow codecs comes along with it–i.e. davinci, autodesk!) for it to become a workstation standard. Ubuntu is there now; you don’t have to be a software geek to figure Linux out anymore. Far from it; I personally think it out-Apple’s Apple in a lot of ways in terms of simplistic design and ease of use.

I don’t think people realize, particularly creative professionals since that’s the market we’re discussing, that trying Ubuntu takes like 15-30 minutes. Download, burn, and restart into the full OS, off the CD! I do this all the time for data or system recovery, it’s one of the best handyman tools to keep around the workstations just for those times you need it. Let’s see Windows and or OS X do anything like that, so easy and hassle free, that you can perhaps try out a new version of the OS or a new OS (for switchers) in 15 minutes, while keeping your current system totally in tact and only like 60 seconds away.

If something like Media Composer or Creative Suite was actually available on Ubuntu, there would be no down side to just giving it a test ride when you have a few hours free, and from there we’d see workstations converting to run Ubuntu full time very rapidly. It’s free, no OS licensing to deal with it, and it doesn’t require you investing in a bunch of new PC’s or whatever. Some of those workstations already have the option of shipping Linux, btw.

In a world where these 2 consumer driven companies are finally figuring how to make devices and platforms that cater toward consumers, I wonder why we’re relying on these 2 platforms anyway. As they dive further and further toward mobile computing that makes sense for playing video and checking Facebook… it seems to me that it does make “business sense” to consider developing for something that’s been better suited for the work all along.

Just my 2 cents I guess.

Cheers,

– weston
letter arrangements: PP CS5 AE MC MBS GVE FCP

[Weston Woodbury]

Dave,

Thanks!

I don’t need it to go to any specific NLE, I’m only wondering about output from AE to different types of codec’s w/ alpha. Is the alpha channel going to be worse is some way if I use something like DNxHD vs. animation or png codec?

Maybe I’ll do some quick tests and see if I can see any noticeable differences. I could even try each file type in different NLE’s.

Also, I didn’t see the regular ‘after effects’ forum or I would’ve probably posted there.

Thx,

– weston
letter arrangements: PP CS5 AE MC MBS GVE FCP