REIC Write On Logo from Post Fifth Pictures on Vimeo.

REIC3D from Post Fifth Pictures on Vimeo.

First you need to learn the terms After Effects uses. When you want to export something with a transparent background the correct term is having an alpha matte. If you export something with only an alpha matte, you won’t see any of your artwork or lower thirds.

I’ve made a simple lower third (nothing fancy about it) with this composition for a fun little piece I did with OCFamily.com. As you can see I have the title and then a black background. I will add this to my render queue.

Now you can see my default “Output module” is ProRes. This won’t help me at all when it comes to rendering something with an alpha matte + RGB. We will want to select Lossless, which is an animation codec based output module. Note: There may be another Lossless with Alpha or Lossless + Alpha setting, but I can’t remember if those were ones I made on my own or came with the program.

Lossless will most likely come up automatically unless the settings are changed on your program. Click on Lossless.

Now another screen pops up with an option to change your Video Output settings. You should see an option for Channels with RGB selected. Click on that and make it say RGB + Alpha. To the right it should say “Animation.”

Click ok. Click render. Import that into FCP or Avid (your Avid settings must be correct to catch the alpha matte, but that is another post for another day) and you should be able to lay it over the video to end up with it working correctly.

Here is how it should come out. You will notice that the third is positioned on the other side of the screen because I had switched it to the other side of the screen for a future project.

http://ae.tutsplus.com/articles/news/adobe-after-effects-cs4-keyboard-shortcuts/

It all seemed to work really well. That wasn’t the case though.

I got my colored version back, spit the new color corrected versions back into my After Effects compositions and then exported again. I rendered for DVD output using compressor. I burned a master DVD of the project in DVD Studio Pro. It should have just worked, right? Well it didn’t. The color of the After Effects clips would change slightly, becoming a little darker. The graphics also did not slide smoothly across the screen either way. Now normally I would spend a lot more time trying to fix the problem, but I had a deadline. This was on a Tuesday and it needed to be back in Valencia, California on a Thursday morning at the latest. I ended up staying awake until 4 AM trying to figure the issues. Here are a few steps I tried.

(Notice how jittery the text moves AND how odd the subject looks while the graphic is up. It’s a different motion than when he is up on screen before)

With the help of Steve Freebairn over at FreeHill Productions I figured out that applying easy ease in and easy ease out keyframes along with some motion blur on the slides would take the jittery look away. I was dealing with all pro res files and exported them from After Effects and into Final Cut Pro. They looked great this time. So I then tried the export again. It still looked odd. The color still changed if I used a reference movie or used compressor. It looked fine if I just did “Export as Self Contained Movie.” The motion problem wasn’t there if I did that either.

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

(Notice the color changes just before that graphic pops out over the right side)

I started to do some Google searches and came over a few articles at Creative Cow saying I need to have exported those raw versions from Final Cut Pro as Animation files instead of Pro Res. It turns out that you don’t notice some of these problems when you are in FCP and or Quicktime because there is an automatic gamma correction. So I did. And guess what, after 4 hours of re rendering my graphics, it looked great. I previewed everything in FCP. The colors appeared to change on my sequence so I exported them as a reference movie. They didn’t change at all! Awesome. The color is now the same. But wait, FCP rendered the Animation files now and they looked shaky again.

I figured if I used those same Pro Res renders again that I could just export the show as a self contained movie, maybe I could then use compressor to get it in DVD Studio Pro.

Not true.

If I took it into DVD SP through a compressor, it somehow detected the gamma change again. Ugh.

I figured out the only way to have my footage and effects work together was to do a self contained movie file and take that right into DVD Studio Pro. It isn’t the way I like to work, but it worked. The DVD Compression looked fine on my QC and after all this I made it to FedEx at 6:03 pm. They unlocked the door for me and overnighted my package to Valencia. I barely made deadline.

Please, I would love any other suggestions as I have searched and found this wasn’t just an issue with my production. What has been the best workflow for you to avoid these gamma issues?

I tested this out so many times on 1 minute segments. I output them all to the desktop. Here is a screenshot of most of my tests.

Cinema 4D Text Into After Effects from Justin Smith on Vimeo.