Tutorial Request: How To Clone Your Self

W

wheatgrinder

Hi all,
We have some great talent here, specifically I'm asking folks for help with the "cloning" technique. I tried it as I understood it, and it came out bad.

In this thread Graeme and I discuss possibilities where I suggest using this technique.. but I really dont know what I'm talking about.

http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=22002

Please reply with any tips, ideas and tutorials you know of...
 
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Thanks dreadylocks :)

Now let's see if you believe me when i say i rush edited those keys in about 72 hours, every single one matted, keyframed, despilled, tweaked, adjusted, tweaked again, adjusted some more, finished....

worse yet, i did the gig solely for the reason i wanted an excuse to finally learn to use after effects, so everything i did was on the fly learning ;)
 
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FilmFestNY said:
Thanks dreadylocks :)

Now let's see if you believe me when i say i rush edited those keys in about 72 hours, every single one matted, keyframed, despilled, tweaked, adjusted, tweaked again, adjusted some more, finished....

worse yet, i did the gig solely for the reason i wanted an excuse to finally learn to use after effects, so everything i did was on the fly learning ;)
Click to expand...

Fun stuff!
 
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Graeme said:
WOW!

Look at this in CS5 AF --> http://tv.adobe.com/watch/after-effects-cs5-feature-tour/rotoscope-with-rotobrush/

Oh Snap!
Click to expand...

knightly said:
Holy timesaver batman!
Click to expand...


Assuming of course that it works as advertised. The awesome "intelligent" adaptive resizing they introduced in photoshop CS4 didn't quite work as well as it appeared to in the sneak peeks at the cool new features..

Sure these things are time savers sometimes, but I've found more often than not they don't work as well as you need and you can end up wasting more time fiddling with things to fix it than it would have taken to just roto with regular masks and such.
 
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Well I'm ~45 minutes left on downloading the trial version, hopefully it will work. I'll let you know my results!

Just enough time to eat some food before I lock myself away for the weekend.
 
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So far so good, currently the main issue I have is understanding how AE is suppose to work in the first place (long time since I last used it, a bit overwhelming).
 
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Results!

Okay, here is my first movie using Premier & After Effects CS5 (Trial Version).

Thoughts:
The Roto Brush Tool is a smart selector Tool, it doesn't track motion super well and I found I had to touch up almost each frame (add leading, remove trail selections), but that could be because I was rotoing extermely complex scenes with fast action and 720p at 24fps. Overall it does save time as I did this clip in around 3 hours (first time using these programs since 2002).

10,000 Marine Clone Test with RotoBrush

I also used the pen mask tool for one scene and if you a bit patient you can get good results using that as well, of course when things overlap the rotobrush tool would be ideal, but avoiding overlap could solve a lot of hassle.

Pluses:
Worked well enough for my purposes and there do seem to be some addition adjustments to improve the masking which if I knew what I was doing may of helped me more.

Minuses:
RotoBush and AE
Rotobrush works a lot better on stationary objects moving slowing or just simply adjusting position, fast movement is not tracked as well and you do need to spend time touching up the mask (and there are some transparency settings I didn't get into).

Premier CS5
Crashed (spinning beach ball and no response) over 20 times (eventually I stopped counting).
Using MacPro OS 10.5.8, 8GZ of Processing over 4 cores, and 9 GIGs of ram.
- Crashed once Importing a Composition from File
- Crashed three times from clip length adjustments
- Crashed twice (4 times I did it) where I changed the AE composition in AE and it updated to PR, One time it to AE with it.
- Crashed and corrupted one project file, when I try to open that file again (and a second time as well) it just crashes mid-loading of the file.
- Crashed when I was moving clips together, or opening a particular clip to play in the preview (happened a couple of times).
- Crashed when I added the "Dip to Black" effect on a Jpeg in the time frame, after that "Dip to Black" transition no longer shows "32" like the "Dip to White" effect does and I can't apply it. (WTF? Really!)
- Crashed on a Invert for the Jpeg (since my fade to black doesn't work anymore), second time I tried it worked without crashing.
- Crashed a couple times while trying to export the file into a H.264 file so I could put it on the web for you guys!
- Crashed at random while I was doing nothing but thinking of the next step [to clip a sequence or not].
Etc = Not Impressed. Spent over an hour trying to merge 3 clips and a photo.

Perhaps I'm not doing something right in Premier... but wowzer, I can't think of what which could cause so much trouble!
 
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Premiere isn't really intended for compositing. Sure the tools are there, but it's not the right tool for the job. you should have done all the compositing and whatnot in AE, and exported the final comp from there.

As for the performance of the rotobrush, I'm willing to bet it will only work really well on shots that are lit such that there is clear separation between the foreground & background. (Notice the extremely strong rim light in the sample video)
 
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I did all the comp work in AE, then tried to 3 comps together in PR along with the pic at the start and the credits at the end. Took over 2 hours to complete what should of been a simple task.

The Strong Rim light in the first scene (3 clones running down the hill) is from the pen-mask tool, I tried to correct a bit but you are right, it is still pretty visible.
 
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I've been reading this thread, and trying to take notes.

I don't have AE, just a basic version of Premiere. I've found either using garbage mat kinda of works, though the clarity/lighting stuff is heck to play with.

Or shooting seperately and layering and hope your "twins" don't go "through" each other. And even then one of them seems....transparent*sigh*

Methinks without AE I'm not getting very far-though I will keep returning to this thread-some good, cool stuff(that looks WAY better than my attempts)going on here.

EDIT: post 666-hope no ones superstitious....;)
 
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Graeme said:
I did all the comp work in AE, then tried to 3 comps together in PR along with the pic at the start and the credits at the end. Took over 2 hours to complete what should of been a simple task.
Click to expand...
This doesn't make sense.. if you comped the shot in AE there wouldn't have been anything to do in Premiere

Graeme said:
The Strong Rim light in the first scene (3 clones running down the hill) is from the pen-mask tool, I tried to correct a bit but you are right, it is still pretty visible.
Click to expand...
Rim light I was referring to was in Adobe's video, not yours.
 
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Will Vincent said:
This doesn't make sense.. if you comped the shot in AE there wouldn't have been anything to do in Premiere
Click to expand...

Thats what I mean, I was just importing, aligning in the time line and adjusting the clip lenghts (cause I made the comp too long - figured out how to fix that about an hour ago). It seems to be extremely unstable, not sure why, maybe I need to do a clean OSX install (thinking of doing that as I'm going to go to snow leopard and get a bigger harddrive).

That said nothing else crashes on my system (except safari on rare occasion when web-code bugger it up). Other CS5 programs don't seem to have a problem running (testing them out today), just Premier.
 
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I'm wondering if it's possible to fix some random issues by trashing prefs in Adobe programs (any Mac/Adobe users that can comment on that?). My wife's computer was crashing and I was able to fix it by trashing prefs for the applications that were offending.

I would think if the system or computer were at fault, it would happen with more apps.
 
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I'd be more inclined to think it's an issue with quicktime, codecs, or inadequate hard drive bandwidth or something.. Specifically the last one, since that wouldn't be an issue in AE as it's not trying to do anything close to real time.
 
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