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AM and FinalCut


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Been working a lot with video for Christmas gifts for family and got to thinking, Oh ya I bet AM will work with it.

I made a few animations in AM, did a green background and then chromakeyed it out in FinalCut. It seemed to work fairly well.

What do you all think?

 

Sorry the files are a lil big.........

ChaseUFO1.mov

DinoRabbitscaled.mov

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  • Hash Fellow

Those look effective! How about some antenna or something on the space ship?

 

I'll note that you can avoid the greenscreening complication by rendering with an alpha channel and using your video editor to composite that way. Presuming your editor understands alpha channels and it probably does.

 

If your video editor has other codec choices you can probably get a much smaller file-size too.

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I've played with this a little in AE and I think greenscreens and chroma keys can be helpful in addition to alpha channels.

 

The instance that I see is that if you need to composite some video images and you want to knock out a part of your animation that has other objects behind it. Since the alpha channel requires you to be able to see straight through, you would have to remove every obstruction, but a greenscreen placed into your set removes that need.

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Several years back, (when I drove a chariot to work) I worked in the art dept. of a rotary screen engraving company. The hardest thing for me to grip in my head was masking, the positive and negative of things. With my limited capacity to absorb things, I think -alpha channels- are like that, so I don't really understand that business yet.

I have seen in Adobe After Effects that cutting or cropping out items is possible but I just started messing with FC so I will be on the look out for it.

 

I remember that Rob did a chromakey thing a while back with his dog but couldn't figure out how he did it.

(hope one day he might do a tut on that....hint....hint....hint

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  • Hash Fellow
I remember that Rob did a chromakey thing a while back with his dog but couldn't figure out how he did it.

(hope one day he might do a tut on that....hint....hint....hint

 

Alpha channels are good when you want to put a computer graphic over some other image such as live action. Basically it makes the background of the computer graphic transparent and lets you use any colors you want without worrying about using a screen color.

 

Color keying is for when you need to place some live action element over another image such as a computer graphic background.

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Is there a tutorial on creating Alpha Channels? I end up just making a pink background for my projects in A:M, and key out the Pink in AE.

 

A:M creates an alpha channel when you go to render, only if the file type allows it and you have the option turned on (avi does not allow for alpha; tga, png, mov, openexr file types do. I don't think bmp has an alpha channel, but A:M seems to think it does)

 

go to camera/output/buffers

 

The alpha info is included in the file. For each file type it is different how it is stored. In general, the alpha channel contains just values of gray to indicate the opacity of the color data (rgb) channels. All white in the alpha channel data indicates 100% opaque, and all black is 100% transparent. a value inbetween 255 - 0 indicates the percent opaque, eg 128 = 50% opaque.

 

A:M creates opacity data for all models rendered to 2D pixels that occlude the default empty background or camera "sky" area. So if all models occlude the sky, then the alpha channel would be all white. If nothing was rendered then the channel would be all black (empty)

alphabufferchannel.jpg

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The alpha channel will make the image transparent (to a compositing program) where ever the camera background color shows.

 

If you want alpha channel in a Quicktime .mov file, that is one of the rare times you will want to choose "Animation" as your quicktime codec.

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No no, it's not an official thing, just something I came up with when I helped out with Red Squad and decided to put it in my Hash profile for kicks. I think there's a legit DarkWing Productions or something, but I dunno what they do. I'm quite literally the one man, one computer concept of Hash Inc :P I am also actually in university at the moment studying Psych

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