[Zak Stoltz]

Ding ding ding! We have a winner! When I turned off OpenGL at first, it didn’t do anything, but then I restarted my computer and the color picker worked like a charm. Then I turned OpenGL back on, and everything still works. Just had to reset it I guess.

Thank you Roland!!!

[Zak Stoltz]

Ah yes. Working with CS5.5 and it’s literally every effect that has a color picker.

[Zak Stoltz]

I did try that, but it’s the same problem. Here’s some screen grabs of what it looks like in AE versus what it looks like in Photoshop when I try to export as layers:

https://imgur.com/a/S6CIN

Photoshop on top.
AE on the bottom.

It’s not the biggest difference, but it’s enough to be annoying and unusable for certain applications.

View post on imgur.com

[Zak Stoltz]

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately that only works halfway. I get the outline transparency back, but some of the semi-transparent colorized areas get knocked out. I might not be creating the mask correctly, but the real problem is that I can’t just open up this image that’s supposed to have transparency built into it.

[Zak Stoltz]

Well, I figured it out. Turns out the problem was that I had Foundry’s Camera Tracker applied to the original clip. It wasn’t actually being used for anything. It was just there.

Something must have gotten screwed up when the other guy who was working on it sent it back to me because he doesn’t have Camera Tracker installed on his system!

Strange how these things work sometimes. It’s an unlikely scenario, but hopefully this helps at least one other person experiencing a similar problem sometime in the future.

[Zak Stoltz]

Select your final comp and then go to File>Reduce Project.

This will delete everything that is not being used by the selected comp.

[Zak Stoltz]

Yeah, that’s what I thought, but I was just curious to see if there was a workaround. It would have been nice to have a solid image come out of the TV, but we have a computer monitor we can use, so it’s no problem.

[Zak Stoltz]

Haha, thanks for saving me that explanation again, Dave. Chris is the second person to misunderstand what I’m talking about. I wonder, is “reconform” the wrong word to use when talking of replacing the ProRes with the original H.264?

In my quest to convince the powers that be to cut out the inefficiency in their workflow, I performed a couple of tests and got some very, VERY interesting results:

Using the Canon EOS plugin for FCP, I transcoded a clip from H.264 to ProRes 422 and compared the gamma, color, and sharpness by “stacking” the original footage and the ProRes one on top of the other and switching back and forth between them at various zoom levels. In terms of gamma and color, they’re IDENTICAL.

Also, I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but it looks like sharpness is actually INCREASED when transcoding from H.264 to ProRes, and that increased sharpness carries over into the final uncompressed 10 bit exports!

After performing the same tests with 10 bit uncompressed exports (one coming directly from the source footage and the other coming from the ProRes transcode), the one coming from ProRes was still the clear winner.

Thanks for the input everyone. Looks like this case is closed.

[Zak Stoltz]

Thanks for the input, guys. This is what I’ve always thought, but the higher-ups at my company don’t seem to share that view…

Does anyone know of a definitive test or example that proves reconforming to H.264 is unnecessary? I’m trying to convince the decision makers here that, as Dave said, it’s a waste of time. 🙂

Also, if anyone disagrees, and thinks it WOULD be beneficial to go back to the original H.264 footage, I’d like to hear from them as well.

[Zak Stoltz]

I’m afraid you’re still not getting it. The native recording format for the 5D is H.264. First we take the original H.264 footage and transcode it to ProRes 422 to edit. Then, once we are done editing, we replacing the transcoded footage with the original footage before exporting it as uncompressed HD. It’s like an online/offline edit. Get it?

So the question then becomes whether or not it makes sense to go back to the original footage as opposed to staying in ProRes before going uncompressed.

It’s the difference between…

[Original H.264] –> [Uncompressed HD]

and

[Original H.264] –> [ProRes 422] –> [Uncompressed HD]

Will the second method listed result in noticeably lesser video quality than the first method?