[Keyser_Soze]

laverdir wrote:

hello,

i would need to isolate a person from the shoot for later keying,
i have one shoot of scene background and one shoot of person
walking through the scene.

i tought that simple xor would be sufficient, but i loose some details
(head, since hair is dark), and it’s dv pal format.

any help is appretieted.

bg: http://www.dalbo.hr/pix/prazna.jpg
scene: http://www.dalbo.hr/pix/ona.jpg

That one my friend I’m afraid you will have to rotoscope manually. No difference key will work here. It might give you something to start with but the colour of her hair and the stripes on her top are to close to the trees. You might be able to get a key of her jeans and maybe the arm but I doubt it will be any good as it’s dv material. So as I said dig into those splines and start rotoscoping 🙂

[Keyser_Soze]

illob32 wrote:

Hi
Would Flint work on a Boxx workstation?
The 7400 to be more precise with an Nvidia Quadro 4500
Thanks

No. Flint is sold as a turnkey system so it will only run on hardware provided by Autodesk.

[Keyser_Soze]

itai wrote:

Seems like they’re developing Toxic, not FFI.
Flame is a collection of modules, some from the Jurasic era, some new, with 3 different Gui’s.
You have 3 types of schematic/nodes design;
Action, MK and Batch.
And you have Combustion and Toxic as well, that’s 5 different design for handling nodes, all from the same company.
The thing FFI is still good for, imo, is the desktop enviorment, with pixel based Paint and editing handy, as well as gestural editing, besides the nice tracker.
If they could only modernize and stream line it.
I wouldnt want FFI to die.

I think that you would find it hard to “streamline” FFI without irritating a lot of people. But I wouldn’t mind getting some new interresting image technology into the box. It’s good to see apps like Toxic or Combustion getting more and more powerful. But I don’t want FFI to be “left behind”. So if you can hear us Discreet. Shape up! 🙂

[Keyser_Soze]

sindbad17 wrote:

I totally agree with Keyser_Soze. From a certain point of view, the flame and Smoke systems seem to come from the stone age, and actually they do. Ten years ago, they were the only systems able to achieve highend effects and compositing. But today, desktop compositing systems like Combustion and even more After Effects feature very common but powerful “effects” like automatic shadow cast that you just can’t find on the FFI systems that actually are 1000 more expansive. Garbage mask are also more powerful in Combustion than on the Smoke or the Flame. And as Keyser_Soze also said, there’s no competition in the “real time compositing market” for discreet. But I also believe that the guys from discreet are aware of that. Why? Because today have can buy a non compressed reatime HD PC based system running combustion or After Effects for 30K dollars. Far less expansive than any Smoke or Flame system, and also, from a cezrtain point of view, more evolved. 😉

I would not like to sit with a client and work in combustion (and defenetily not after effects – that’s for motion graphics not compositing). No matter how fast the computer is. And that is why I think Discreet/Autodesk still can go slow with development. There really isn’t any serious competition in the client attended “real time compositing” market. Although I admit that the power of desktop systems are becomming pretty impressive. If you still can draw a line between “highend” and desktop? I mean smoke/flint is “just” an ibm pc 🙂

[Keyser_Soze]

hyrlvlrec wrote:

I know theres more to this, so please, someone inform me…..

I had to simulate shadows for an actor shot on greenscreen today for a 30spot…i was posting in smoke7…..stupid tedious work

When i got home, i went to open a combustion3 comp ive been working on for another freelance project and accidentally opened one of the combustion tutorial comps, only to realize that combustion was creating a shadow for one of the layers

i only became more and more ticked off as i played with the light source in the comp, watching the shadow react accordingly

So….. anyone know of any good reason why flame or smoke cannot create true shadows that react to lights in a composite???

Because the software is old and there is no real competition. Imagine what they could do at autodesk if they felt somebody was breathing down their neck. As it is now they can just continue with “minor” updates. I mean I love their tracker and it’s very accurate. But it is old technology. What if they managed to write something like the tracker of mokey. That would be something 🙂 And so on…

[Keyser_Soze]

junglerose wrote:

and any advice re: satin/patterns to avoid with this?

much appreciated

I would strongly advice against using satin. It is a reflective material ie. you will get unwanted highlights. What you will want is a bluescreen that is as even as possible and the satin material won’t help you. There are special cloths that you can rent especially made for the task. Get one of those. And while we are talking about even or not. Make sure that the bluescreen is evenly lit. That will help you a lot later on when keying. Good luck.

[Keyser_Soze]

What version of combustion are you using? You might consider using a third party keyer as the ones coming with combustion itself are pretty basic, although the latest version has the diamond keyer… pretty interresting but there are even better keyers out there.

[Keyser_Soze]

Here’s a link:
http://www.fischeredit.com/post/green/

More links from fxguide:
http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Web_Links&file=index&l_op=viewlink&cid=12

and

http://www.fxguide.com/fxtips-45.html

The grain problems you have are probably due to the 16 mm film you are using. You would be better off using 35. But I guess that is a budget issue?
And as Paul said, don’t ever use any secondary grading to “improve” your footage. You will need 2 passes. One pass with the actual graded footage and a secondary pass left “flat” for keying. Or if you just use the flat pass and match that to your background.

Cheers

[Keyser_Soze]

Rogurt wrote:

Hi Folks

I have severe problems accomplishing the following task:
I want to sample the colour value of a spot in a layer (a image seq.) then I want the sampled value (over consecutive frames) to change the brightness of another layer. But how?

What I tried:
Background Layer1 (with the action and the colour value to be sampled in a distinct spot). Another Layer2 with a clone object (cloning the portion of interest of the BackLayer). Layer2 is nested with some new layer3 (that would be parts of a mask or cleanplate). Layer2 is scaled quite big and transfer mode is set to luminance to have it affect the luminance of the layer3 beneath it.

Results are not very good though…

Anyone an idea?

Cheers, Rogurt

Try sapphire flickermatch and flickermatch color from genarts.
I think tinder has a flickermatch plug-in as well.

[Keyser_Soze]

wolf wrote:

i was wondering if you guys could outline some of the basic workflows you use for EDL conforms.
are you assembling the edl to your desktop and then make all the changes
you need to “fix” problems and add effect shots.
it seems to take a long time for one of our artists to conform on the desktop.
some of the fades and dissolves seems to be wrong.
how do you guys deal with this stuff.

any suggestions ?

This is how I do it most of the time. Load the edl. Check timewarps if you see something like speed 199,2 procent you can be pretty sure it’s 200 proc. Capture your stuff. I usually capture my material with 10 handles (to later be able to correct clips that aren’t slipped right). Conform and bring it to the desktop. Now you will need an “avid edit” as well, to doublecheck that everything is in it’s place. There are a number of ways that you can check this. A quick one is to lock the conform and the avid edit together and scroll through them on the desktop to se if it’s ok (use shortcut “L” to lock reels). The small preview is often not enough to check if it’s spot on. So there are more ways to do this if you suspect something isn’t right.

1. Go into the color corrector with your clips as front and back. Use a crop to reveal the back. And scroll.

2. Sometimes the the telecine orig is zoomed in or differs from the onelight material then it might be a bit tricky to check stuff in the color corrector (wich is faster). So you can do the check in action instead. Use a “gmask-key” to reveal the back and adjust size and position. Now it’s easier to check if anything seems to be slipped or whatever.
You can also do the old trick: invert your front layer and adjust opacity to 50% if everything is ok it will be gray (or close to).

3. Another way is to use difference. If something is wrong or slipped you will see it (hopefully).

Now when you have checked your material and let’s say you ended up with a number of slipped clips in your conform. You can also see that it’s is slipped with the same amount every time and that it’s probably from the same source tape. If your edl conform is a complicated one it might be a good idea to go back to the edl, slip and adjust the material there and conform again. Otherwise just do your changes “on the desktop”.
Besides from slipped clips other things to look out for are: timewarps, flips, zooms, dissolves and more.
Hopefully you now have a conform that is ready to start working with.

And by the way… these things can take time. Especially if something is fu**ed with the source material, like timecode breaks or duplicate timecodes or completely off timecodes. Then you will have to eyematch. And depending on the source material and how that looks it might be a major pain in the butt. Sometimes it’s probably a good idea to go back into the avid again and sync things there to get a new edl. Probably cheaper than spending a day in flame just to conform.

Cheers

Ps. And to you guys that shoot videos with a dv-camera set to freerun or whatever it’s called (ie. timecode will reset every time you stop recording). And then give us a crappy edl and a shitload of poorly named dv-tapes with soo many timecode breaks you can’t count them… I will personally come and shoot you in the head!!! If you want to avoid this please transfer your source material to another tape with nice clean continous timecode and do your edit from that tape. Thank you!

[Keyser_Soze]

mdoane wrote:

did somebody say lustre on a mac????!!??

See it with your own eyes…

[Keyser_Soze]

BKM wrote:

How long to we get a recap of what was seen/heard at NAB regarding some of the future Autodesk/Discreet systems??

Specifically for me… Smoke 7.

But any news for thouse of us that weren’t allowed to go…. would be great.

Thanks,

BKM

THINGS TO COME:

SMOKE

– Motion (slomo) in Timewarp

– clip history

– History displayed in a batch tree

– Finalcut meta data import

– Burn render

– new ways of working instead of containers

– Integrated text module in timeline

– Keycode in edl manager

– fonts can be directly imported

FLAME

– Motion estimated motionblur

– Paint in batch

– Rendering with “point of interest”

– new blur, faster, rackdefoucus, directional blur.

– improved resize

– Floatingpoint image processing

– easier ways of saving versions in batch

LUSTRE

– Automatic tracking of masks. Also a 3d tracker that was great. Opens up new ways of grading,

AVAILABLE SOON:

FLINT/SMOKE

– Vers 9.2 HD&SD I/O (apparently there is no way of upgrading your current SD linux system. If you want HD you will have to buy a new box)

Running 8-bit HD I/O on the IBM 6224 Linux platform, the Flint 9.2 and Smoke 6.7 systems feature:

-Apple Final Cut Pro XML format support: Editorial decisions made in Final Cut Pro are transferable to
Discreet systems, thereby simplifying the post-production process (Announced separately)

-Autodesk WiretapTM 1.5 support: Increases third party application access to media from
Inferno, Flame, Flint, Fire and Smoke systems’ media via Autodesk® Stone®

LUSTRE

– Wiretap, grade a clip over the network, no need to copy it to yout local stone,

– CPU boost, ie 4 secondarys in 2K realtime

– A mac version. Very cool.

[Keyser_Soze]

Jonas wrote:

Hi there,

We have a commercial we need to finish in 14 days – and we desperately needs a mattepaint artist – So if you are a good mattepaint artist and awaible (you could work from anywhere) please mail some work to :

[email protected]

Maybe you will find somebody here:
http://www.mattepainting.org/index.php?categoryid=13&p16_sectionid=2
http://www.mattepainting.org

Good luck

[Keyser_Soze]

Jonas wrote:

thanks for great advice. I was looking very gladly into using the timeline/edit fx in batch to work on a whole commercial, copy pasting settings and just caching when I hit play – and when happy hit process !! but that dosen’t work at all or ??? how often will it chrash in this scenaria ???

Well you can use the timeline with EditFX in batch but I’d definitely advise against it. It works but it seems very unstable. I think it crasched pretty much every time I tried to do anything more “serious” and those times I couldn’t recover any of the things I did. So EditFX is not something I’d use. I do hope it will be fixed soon because drag and drop effects are a very fast way of working.

[Keyser_Soze]

Jonas wrote:

Quote:

Bugs… hehe I could go on forever:
– Clip history is totally unstable and can give you massive dataloss if enabled. My tip (and Discreet’s) – don’t use clip history.
– Batch is unstable and I’lve lost a lot of work from trying to use the timeline in batch and “EditFX” type of workflow. Don’t use EditFX!
-The distort node in batch “goes bananas” sometimes – probably related to batch overall instability.
-To often Flint crasches when I hit render in batch (always save before rendering).
That was just a few of them. I bet there are more bugs lurking out there…

Hi there Keyser_Soze & john

We are actually looking into buying flint! especially beauce of new 9.0 features like the batch timeline / EditFX workflow – AND because we are suffering from a unstable competetive system.

In our old flame 8.5 I worked all the time in batch – would you say that batch is general unstable in Flint 9 compared to Flame 8.5.

Is some of these issues fixed in the upcoming flint 9.2 or ???

How about smoke on linux – how stable is that ??

I’m still on 9.0.3 so I don’t know if the things I talked about are fixed or not. Anyway I think that in general Flint is a very nice piece of soft despite it’s bugs. Though it has taken a lot of grinding teeth to find out all those faults and how to avoid them. Now that I know how, I can work with clients without feeling embarassed. And I’m not losing setups and clips if I avoid the folowing: No clip history. No timeline/EditFX. Always save before rendering in batch. And make sure that the tablet is working ok, the system seems to be very sensitive to this.
As I said before… overall I’m happy with how it works althought it has some major bugs. I’m pretty sure this will be fixed soon. So I won’t advise you not to get a system. But you should know that Flint is new on Linux. I’m not surprised it’s not totally stable yet.

Cheers

[Author]

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