Some Post Production Workflow

I'm so sorry, I thought I had replied to this at the time! Your response was very helpful because I hadn't known about that linear advantage. I've also mostly stopped using After Effects and now do my compositing in DaVinci Resolve/Fusion, which has its quirks but just feels so much snappier and up with the times. Thanks a lot for the help!

I also recommend using Correlated Multi-Jitter

Ian Hubert

AH! That's clever!! That's rad, thanks for that :D

Alejandro Gallegos

Dude this was a real eye opener into the dangerous world of compositing in blender. Now, I can’t stop! That grain though... looks nice for static images, but for animation I figure it needs to move, and there should be more on the darker parts. So... I put a noise modifier in the coordinates of the noise node to move it around. Then I put the noise through a luminace key and Invert it to get the matte for the dark parts, multiply it with the original noise, and then mix that result with the original noise again, so i get full screen moving noise with darker noisier parts.

Zachary Macintyre

Nice, this image blew me away when I saw it, I was hoping we'd get to see some breakdowns.

Ian Letarte

Yes, thanks for this! :)

Great stuff, Ian!

Carter Burr-Kirven

You could always use single-pass EXRs if your concern is file management/downloading/saving time on extraction. And the primary selling point of EXRs is that they preserve your scene's true linear data, so compositing and blending operations behave correctly, bokeh highlights bloom properly, motion blur looks more realistic, and passes like depth and world position hold all the correct data instead of being clamped or normalized. That said, After Effects is notoriously slow and terrible with EXRs, and while linear workflow is the "right" way to do things, if your scene doesn't need it, you can definitely get away with PNGs and the normal color workflow.

Phillip Park

Thank you for the breakdown! This helps a lot!

shonal bose

okay now am getting it....

Ian Hubert

AH! yeah! That project file is actually from a tut I'm making explaining that very thing, haha! That said, I'm overthinking it, so we'll see when I can wrap it up, but hopefully in the next week here :D I'm crazy excited about it, actually. But the super short answer is: pre-key the footage (into a format that allows alpha channels, like a TIFF sequence or ProRes444), and use that footage as a video texture on a plane in-scene, ideally on an emission shader.

This is great. How do you have the character in 3d/2d outside of the camera view? Would be great if could show that

Ian Hubert

Ah, cool! I hope there was some useful information in there!

Awesome.. for so long I am waiting for this, thank you.

Kennisoan

thanks <3

was about to ask for your post processing workflow, thanks a lot.

Justin

this is awesome information, thank you for sharing!

shonal bose

would be amazing if you could share the project file and video ..so we can try it out in blender.And the green screen keying is done in blender looks good....is the compositor in blender similar to nuke or more scary....thanks in advance

Jan van den Hemel

Ah yes, thank you! I was curious to see your After Effects workflow. Very interesting!

Ian Hubert

Oh, yeah!! Actually, if you're familiar with the shader editor, IMO it's a lot more friendly than that :D.

Excellent little Blender tutorial. I've stayed away from the compositor in Blender but it doesn't look that scary.

I used to love the idea of EXR files but after using them for my latest music video I find them incredibly overrated. I mean, first of all if you're using a render farm that will make each file that more gigantic, and now you can't for example do the iterative process of downloading all of your beauty pass frames and starting working on them in AE while the rest downloads – your only option is to download all of the passes for each frame (which is an option you also do have when using PNGs so by definition, EXRs give you fewer options). And secondly, if you use EXRs in AE you're just constantly wasting processing power in that pass extraction, so what I ended up doing for my video was pre-rendering each extracted pass into PNGs and then using the PNG sequences to composite with. So now I really don't see the benefit in EXRs aside from keeping the file system a little neater. If there's more to it that someone could let me know I'll be all ears.

Chipp Walters

Yep, good stuff. Thanks 👍