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I’ve been experimenting with some advanced chroma keying methods to specifically deal with reflections and subtle details like this car plate.
Often times we use keylight to get rid of everything that is green but in some cases we want to keep some of the reflections to make a shot more realistic. Some of these tips are quite noteworthy because the footage being used is from a Canon 5D which can be particularly noisy due to compression artifacts. Pulling a good key is already challenging enough but leaving in small details without flicker is even more problematic. I think I have figured out a few good methods and we even filmed another behind the scenes video to show how we setup the shots. Look for the video and tutorial soon.
In the midst of our biggest product release to date and the upcoming video blog, I managed to find some time to develop a free training for the design and authoring of a playable video DVD. I think many people are familiar with the process but it is so important, I wanted to make this available to the community.
I’ll be covering loopable motion menus, rendering and compression, plus authoring the DVD in Encore. We’ll talk about export formats and what format I like to actually work in. Should be a lot of fun and Sam is sure to get his recon on.
Only a few days of the new year and we already completed a big promotional video for an awesome client, just in time for CES. The shoot on Friday went really well, we had our shot list and everyone was on time. Unfortunately there wasn’t a folding chair with my name on it but what can you do.
We decided to shoot at 3K, 16×9 so we could get the 47 fps to use for slow motion in post. What happened to the extra frame per second is anyone’s guess… The lighting was excellent and that RED really does make nice images.
Post Production:
We processed about 15 minutes (at 47fps) of 3K footage in roughly 7 hours which isn’t too bad if you know what to expect but also enough time to watch Titanic two times and cook a roast. It seems Adobe and Red have a new plug-in for native Red footage support but it is only for CS4 and I imagine it would be pretty CPU intensive.
Using RED’s software, I exported to QuickTime with the Pro Res codec at half resolution since you can’t down-res an image sequence and full resolution 3K would have been overkill for a 720p project.
Once in After Effects the keying was incredible, especially if you know the hassles of DV or HDV compression. After a month or so...
READ MOREWith all of the many render settings, I get asked what is the best way to render in After Effects. Well there are many things to consider. Is the video being rendered over a network? If so each computer must pick one frame to render at a time and thus you cannot use a single file format like AVI or MOV. Instead image sequences like PNG or TIFF are ideal because of the uncompressed image data. For the average Joe F. Ex, the single file rendering is a great solution.
The render option I recommend is a QuickTime Movie. When you setup your output module, choose Quicktime for the format and then for the codec, here are the three I recommend. I rendered a minute of video with the 3 formats.
1. PhotoJPG (at 95% quality)
- Smaller file size
- Fast compression
- Withstands several generations before losing apparent quality
- 239 MBs for 1 minute video @ 864×480 29.97fps
- 1 Minute render took 1:18
2. PNG
- Medium-large file size
- Very slow compression!
- Uncompressed format, no re-render generation loss
- 952 MBs for 1 minute video @ 864×480 29.97fps
- 1 Minute render took 8:44
3. Animation
- Huge file size
- Fast compression (writing to disc can slow down the render)
- Uncompressed format, no re-render...