re: dumber than a box of rocks

[steve wells]

Well, I was able to achieve some pretty fair results, given that I know nothing about After Effects. But that's as far as it went. When I tried to pull the project back into Premiere Pro, I got an "unrecognized format" error. What the heck is that?! I can't imagine that Adobe would have anything that couldn't switch back and forth between applications.

Will investigate more today. So far have spent about 3 weeks on a $1500 project and let my main business slide by the way side.:confused:

And by the by, I still can't figure out where the heck "garbage" mattes are in AE6.0. Like I said, dumber than a box of rocks. I mean, there's a tab/effect in Premiere. Why the ...k can't they be consistant with attributes between products?

Sorry. Just venting. And, lastly brudder Ben, this Zap fellow is the one who directed me to dvGarage and specifically, to you. He's a very talented young man from the look of some of his projects.

Now back to your corner and get crackin' with some more code.:D

<see how fast they turn on you, he said with a toothy grin>

as always.....

steve

[Arthur Vibert]

I found the Composite Toolkit (available from dv Garage) to be really useful as a way of learning many different techniques for pulling a matte in AE. It's for an older version, but the principles remain the same. And it will also help you find the way to do a Garbage Matte in AE :)

[bensyverson]

Hey Steve,

While you can import a PP project file into AE, you can't import an AE project file into PP. That's basically because AE has so many features that aren't available in PP, whereas almost all of the features of PP can be recreated within AE.

Anyway, to bring your footage back into PP, first render out your composite to a DV movie, and then import that movie into PP.

To garbage matte a layer in AE:
- select the layer
- click on the pen tool in the "tools" window
- draw a garbage matte around your subject. Note that since the pen tool is bezier-based, you can't just click and drag to draw a line. Click once, and then click again somewhere else, and there will be a line between the two points.
- For the garbage matte to work, you have to "close" the shape, so when you're close to the beginning point again, click on it, and it should close the shape and turn into a mask!

Arthur is right -- the Composite Toolkit can clear up a lot of these questions for you, and show you some really great tips for your composites.

Good luck, and keep us updated!

- ben