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I have zero faith in Apple delivering anything qualifying as a “professional” app at this point. I’d love love to be proven wrong, but after spending some time with Color I have zero faith in their pro agenda going forward. I have a friend of a friend (I know right?) who says it’s going to be amazing, but we’ll see. If it ever comes out that is.
I also don’t see them getting into the business of beating flame. Building turnkey solutions has never been something Apple’s cared about. I don’t see them starting now, especially with such a small and specific target. I would like to see them try, because as much as I love flame, I wouldn’t mind some competition.
If you could link to a still or movie of sort of what you’re thinking of, it’d be easier to help out.
I’m always eager to use flame particles. Haha.
Yeah, the year releases are identical now.
Even back in the 9.5/6.5 days the software was effectively the same. Inferno action had “multi sampling” which is an effectively “free” 4x AA, or at least that’s how it was explained to me.
Flint’s got a few things missing from what I’ve read/heard: missing the modular keyer, action doesn’t have gaussian blurs and probably some other stuff.
Yeah, that would be a nice option. Maya has “Clamped” as an option that does just that. I do spent a fair amount of time alt-clicking those handles to level them out.
I don’t know of any expression tricks though. Can expressions even deal with hermite tangents?
the one thing that tip does not mention (and it’s an excellent guide) is that the trackers are a lot easier to manage of you change the toggle to “Solo” instead of “Gang” or “Selected”
That makes it so all trackers other than the one you are on are effectively deactivated and hidden, but you don’t have to go through all the hassle of turning them on and off. Add a new tracker and the previous one disappears. Makes the tracking of 20+ points much easier.
Yeah, that’s a tricky one.
What I’d personally do/try is to get an camera & object track out of PFTrack or some equivalent and then make a primitive cylinder (or whatever would be a decent analog for the various parts) and texture said cylinder w/ the animation in Maya.
Which is to say pretty much like you were planning. 🙂
You may be able to get lucky with some mesh warping/bicubics (I don’t know what AE or Nuke calls that, but it’s an image plane w/ bezier handles that you can move in 3d space) as well.
If you can, try to shoot and edit it so that there’s a minimum of 3d tracking needed.
Always remember, the trick to VFX is to cheat whenever possible. If it looks right, it is right afterall.
I’ve seen edges come up that shouldn’t (straight fills for type over flat color) on images recently. Upping the AA settings in action took care of it. I shouldn’t have to do that, but I was in a rush and never dug deep enough to see if it was some recent bug or there was something wanky someplace else.
If you’re resizing on import you could see if your quality setting’s on something like “Draft” instead of “bicubic” or “Quality”. That could affect your mattes enough to be a problem.
I don’t want to scream “BUG!” until I do more research, preferably when clients aren’t behind me. Haha.
If you don’t like people working with you/peering over your shoulder/etc then doing something like Shake or Nuke is probably a better choice. That being said, I have had plenty of gigs that involve no client sessions whatsoever. Movie and Network stuff has a less client-centric workflow. Commericals (admittely the bread and butter of flame) are generally client heavy.
I personally get way more stressed out when I have to use After Effects or Shake, which is a solid argument that it’s more about your experince with the software than it is with someone peering over your shoulder.
Aaaah. Gotcha.
I think Mike Seymour and company have some way of doing it. I remember some of the FXPHD stuff being a nice clean capture of that sort of thing, but I have no clue.
Personally i’d just cheat it by making fake tracking markers.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re going for here, but a workaround would be to make little dots parented to whatever trackers you want to see and render them onto the footage.
otherwise,
by trackers do you mean the flame “trackers” or tracking marks on a subject? What is the goal of having these trackers visible cos I’m confused.the “Burn In” node in batch (and i’d imaigne on the desktop, but i’m not in front of a machine at the moment) will do letterboxing. Dial in the aspect and hit go. Easy peasy.
Yeah, I too have had minor issues with the folder system, but it does beat the machine having to flick through thousands of files in the /batch directory every time I load a setup.
Granted it’s half a year later and hopefully you’ve solved the problem in some way (haha) but what I always end up doing, either with the Tinder or Sapphire lens blur is create a stack of them with the output of the first going into the second and so on, then hand animating the focus on each one.
Not ideal, nor scientific, but I’ve always been happy with the results.
Assuming it’s not Pabst Blue Ribbon, yeah.
Though i’m no expert, I believe it’s effectively the same as HDR lighting with light probes, ball enviorment maps and the like.
Take a bunch of pictures of the area, light with that.
I just finished up a shoot that I supervised for a similar situation. In my situation we lit the greenscreen a stop over the subject.
While I did get good keys, (and if you have a lot of darks in your foreground you can get some really nice edge detail due to the green being so bright) I also spent a lot (a LOT) of time getting edges not to glow because of the brightness of the screen. I think that’s always gonna be the doom of night greenscreens, but being a stop over subject didn’t help.
this page
http://www.fischeredit.com/post/green/
recommends lighting the screen at or just below the talent, which I would say is a great rule of thumb.As for spill, get that screen evenly lit. Be a complete prick about it. I mean, do it nicely, but the whole point of a greenscreen shoot is to make something workable for the VFX team. Don’t judge by the monitor, meter the whole thing and make sure it’s within 1/3 a stop of itself. The closer the better. An even screen will separate much better from it’s spill than a poorly lit one.