I have never used Adobe after effects in my life, nor have I used any other effect program, the most advanced effects I have used are on final cut and Windows movie maker, so this tutorial was a massive learning curve for me. The interface is pretty simple and easy to get used to so I felt pretty comfortable with it by the end of the lesson, the possibilities however are overwhelming, there are literally hundreds of things that you could do with that program!
In this tutorial we focused on Keying, removing the green from greenscreen shots. We did this in two ways, first with the Linear Colour key. This method was pretty complicated, there were a lot of variables to play around with and alter to get better or different effects. We also added a Spill Suppressor and a Matte Colour Choker to the Linear Colour Key footage to reduce the green reflection and smooth the edges. Personally I couldn't get any particularly good results from this method, everything seemed to be a little grey and I couldn't get rid of some of the background without taking away the white dress of the actress. This highlighted the importance of lighting the greenscreen flatly as the difficult parts were those that had been lit too brightly and were near props.
Another important learning point was that it helps a lot to know the background you will be adding to the footage, and to have different angles and distance shots of the background so that when you add them in you have a lot to work with. I noticed it is also important to make sure you get the head and feet (the top and bottom) of your characters on shot when working on the greenscreen wide, if you dont do this you ahve less freedom when positioning your characters on the background.
The second method we used to remove the green was Keylight. We didn't have time to compare methods on one piece of footage so I can't tell perfectly how they compared but personally it seemed like Keylight was far superior in its result. On the downside however there was less user input, I can see that being a problem as it means the user has less control. The scond piece of footage we used was the mirror from our very own shoot, the wish was to get a twisted reflection in the mirror and then have the girl and reflection to touch the mirror, causing it to ripple. This was a little tricky because of the speed at which she raises her arm to touch the mirror. With a more carefully directed shoot I think this would have been avoided but still I think the problem is resolvable with manipulation of time in the edit. I would prefer to do that time editing in a different program however because of the rendering time involved in After effects. Once I have edited the scene together I am going to try and add the effects again.
We used key frames and motion to effect the mirror scene and the ripples, using key frames is something I have done in final cut so this was quite familiar, it just took a while to adapt to the different layout.
I have learned loads about after effects! I am really looking forward to having more fun with it. I still however when possible prefer to use practical effects, its just a personal matter of opinion, I have always said if it can be done without a computer program then thats the way it should be done. That being said, after effects does open up a lot of affordable opportunities, my imagination is running wild!
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