|
|
Hi Roei, Thanks for the Mocha suggestions. I saw that you posted to the Mocha user forums and I'll make sure to log the requests. -Ross
Thank everyone! examining a few approaches led me to these conclusions:
A. linking splines in mocha and back to Ae works (until you need to update)...
examining the mocha<->ae workflow, I wish mocha splines<->Ae masks workflow was better so Ross please consider these two features:
1. copy pasting Ae masks to mocha splines. this way, one could create the masks in Ae then import them to mocha and not just vice versa (I know mocha import script can do this, but I wish this could be native)
2. create Ae masks in the mocha plugin could use "update Ae masks" feature. so if I do an update to my splines in mocha and use "update Ae mattes" it would update the masks instead of creating new ones (say if they have the same name)
B. using Ae's compositing options to mask different instances of the keying effect in the same layer works also and would solve my accumulating alpha issue but gets messy pretty quickly.
C. converting the mattes to luma works to prevent accumulating alpha. my setup was like you said - use fill set to white, a black solid at the bottom of each layer using solid composite, then using the lighten blending and it works and gives me the max of the alpha area and not combining alpha. placing on top of the mattes an adj with set matte set to luminance to convert everything to alpha and then unmult effect gives me perfect alpha, and on top of that I place the footage with preserve underlying transparency and I get everything without precomposing :)
oh... yes. An idea to get an Max combined matte as Brian mention, is to fill all your layers RGB with white and the transparent with black (Solid Composite set to black), use the Lighten blend mode (works like an Max operator) on all these layers to get your new combined B/W matte. Add an adjustment layer over all these layers with an Unmult effect (get the Mekajiki version), then lastly add your original layer on top over all these set to Preserve Underlying Transparency.
If you happen to have Primatte Studio (in Continuum) - this is a great keyer that can handle transparencies and includes the Mocha masking internally - so you could mix and masks layers with varying opacity in the one layer.
When I read this thread, I was reminded of my earlier days in node-based compositing, where it is very useful to pipe your mattes into math comps to combine and keep separate from your fill, then bring it all back together. Node-based systems like NUKE or Fusion really are great for this type of compositing. I am sure you could emulate this with AE and channel your masks/mattes separately in their own pre-comps and than combine it all together. If the mask work is not too complicated to quickly do again in mocha, then you could do all the masks with linked masks there, and via the Mocha plugin get the animated mask paths to copy to the masks on the original layers?
but 2 antialiased edges right next to eachother will still not get you a 100% tight edge, 50% alpha + 50% alpha does not equal 100% alpha. But then you maybe could use the Add Alpha blendmodes to get better merge of the masks. This is a case where it actually would be useful to have the option to render masks an un-anti-aliased (guess that is called aliased :-P) to get 100% pixel perfect merge of mask alphas.
I dont know if it can be used for your case, but maybe a bit of rethinking of the setup and you could do the keying on 1 layer but using the masks as Effect Masks instead?
Robert
Thx Mike, Having a stencil from them for my RGB doesn’t solve my Alpha channel problem.
Let me explain it in another way:
I am creating different mattes with semi transparent areas in the overlapping and that causes a problem because the create multiplication of the alpha information
The ideal way to fix this is if the mask could be perfectly adjacent to one another the same way a mask on “add” and its duplicate on “subtract” work. Only that I have more than 2 masks.
Could you add a further copy of the original footage on top of all your keyed layers and enable ' preserve underlying transparency' ?
-- Ross ShainChief Product Officer / Business Development mobile: +1.646.298.6458
--
Ross ShainChief Product Officer / Business Development mobile: +1.646.298.6458
|
|
