Topic: Multimedia hints, tips, tricks and tutorials

How about posting hints, tips, tricks and tutorials for your weapons of choice (software, cameras, film-making, editing etc). Maybe something you wished you would have known when you were beginning to learn or something you have incorporated into your workflow.

Two here from me. The first one I use all the time, the second one I wish someone would have told me when I first started messing about with After Effects.

Find grey for colour correction (Photoshop)

With the image open in Photoshop
1) Make new layer and fill it with 50% grey.
2) Change the blend mode to difference.
3) Add Threshold adjustment. Drag the white slider all the way to the left. When you start dragging the slider back to the right, the first things you see are the grey areas.
4) Choose couple of grey spots so when you look for the grey in the image for colour correction you have much better chance of finding your grey's.


Using Audio in After Effects

Don’t use mp3 file format in your project. You will get audio problems in the final render.
Open the song or audio file in Quicktime or a converter of your choice and then export it as AIFF file and import that one into your project for better results.

Last edited by AshDigital (2013-01-03 22:00:27)

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Re: Multimedia hints, tips, tricks and tutorials

That threshold trick is fun. I'm gonna play with that.

I find, among many other ways to get a comp that's not-quite-there there, a trick you can use is mostly color correction. Sometimes things just need one more round of being tied together in comp.

For this, my favorite dirty secret for maybe getting it there fast is to take your final image - comp, whatever - and duplicate, invert, set to Soft Light. This will intuitively minimize everything and drag everything very close together, almost like you're looking at a log image. Then, you add an adjustment layer and have a bit of fun with the gamma, highs, and lows in Levels. Often this will result in getting you back to what looks almost exactly like what you had, but everything just blends together a bit better, because you are artificially bringing contrast BACK to something that has been homogenized.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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Re: Multimedia hints, tips, tricks and tutorials

This is a trick that everyone knew back in the day but it's possible they don't anymore, since dvGarage is no longer much of a thing.

When you're putting together a composite and you need to color correct one layer to match another -- say matching a greenscreen foreground to a sunset background plate -- color correct each channel (R, G, B) separately while looking only at that channel. That way you're matching black, white, and grey points on greyscale images, and your eye is much better at distinguishing differences in luminance than chrominance. Get each channel to the point that it looks like the foreground and background belong together in greyscale, and nine times out of ten the full RGB image will be nailed.

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Re: Multimedia hints, tips, tricks and tutorials

^^^

This.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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Re: Multimedia hints, tips, tricks and tutorials

If you're doing a screen replacement cut out the blank screen from the original layer and place it over what your putting "on screen" and tweak the gamma levels to make it look like it is inside the glass.

If your on set go one further and turn the camera around and film a reflection pass and add that with something like 25% opacity.

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