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Additional Tutorial Topics


jan1
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Here are a few topics of things I do frequently and where I'm not 100% yet how to do in Mistika BT:

1) Use the base vector to key skin or some other element before any color correction, and then route that key to a later vector, possibly even combining two keys and adding a mask (similar to key mixer in Resolve tree). I've gotten it to work by enabling the extern key in the key tab and selecting the appropriate vector and alpha. But not sure I'm getting all the nuances and best practices.

2) Importing external EXR sequences from another roto software. I've been able to export the EXR and create the roto mask, but am not clear how to re-import the EXR files and use them as an alpha channel.

Thanks. Maybe others can add their requests over time and turn this into a wishlist for tutorial topics.

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Good idea Jan.  I'm working my way through the manual  at the minute, but I'd like to see a tutorial on the Title Tool - designing titles and lower thirds / creating a template / creating complicated end rollers.  I'd also like to see how the subtitling works.  (There may be more to subtitling, but so far, it looks fairly basic.  And it looks like you can't change the font / size after initial import.)  But maybe there's more to it...

 

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On 4/6/2019 at 1:00 AM, jan1 said:

Here are a few topics of things I do frequently and where I'm not 100% yet how to do in Mistika BT:

1) Use the base vector to key skin or some other element before any color correction, and then route that key to a later vector, possibly even combining two keys and adding a mask (similar to key mixer in Resolve tree). I've gotten it to work by enabling the extern key in the key tab and selecting the appropriate vector and alpha. But not sure I'm getting all the nuances and best practices.

2) Importing external EXR sequences from another roto software. I've been able to export the EXR and create the roto mask, but am not clear how to re-import the EXR files and use them as an alpha channel.

Thanks. Maybe others can add their requests over time and turn this into a wishlist for tutorial topics.

Hi Jan 

i use the color fx to do compositing and other color manipulation keying and stuff using the recover mode

attach jpegs.

you can recover from inside or outside. using shape as i did in the example or key or any kind of blend modes.

or the combination of all. ?

this is how I'm doing Sky replacement and other complex comps.

cheers Yoav

Screen Shot 2nd input b.png

Screen Shot 2nd input a.png

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So an additional topic that would be great is doing a conform from various apps and through various file formats.

I had some mixed results in my latest attempts. A short commercial edited in Avid, an AAF export has come mostly across, except for image sequences. I've tried various EDL exports from Avid and they all failed mostly stacking everything on top of each other.

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Hi Jan!

First of all, new tutorials are coming up soon. Right now, the NAB is taking most of our time. But the road map is to keep posting new ones on a daily basis. So thanks a lot for the feedback, we'll take them as suggestions for future ones. Besides, apart from these short tutorials, there are also planned webinars and long tutorials that will go on deeper in Mistika Boutique.

Now, I'll explain briefly the  first two questions that opened this thread ?

On 4/6/2019 at 12:00 AM, jan1 said:

1) Use the base vector to key skin or some other element before any color correction, and then route that key to a later vector, possibly even combining two keys and adding a mask (similar to key mixer in Resolve tree). I've gotten it to work by enabling the extern key in the key tab and selecting the appropriate vector and alpha. But not sure I'm getting all the nuances and best practices.

1

This can be a bit tricky to understand but it is actually quite simple! However, a tutorial is planned to explain in detailed this matter. In order to do this we have to go to the Output menu in the right part of the keyer tab:

 

image.png.a30790e25e0fa4ceb5fcd7d5faabc005.png

Export alpha settings

This menu is the one that lets you Export an alpha that you have created in the keyer tab of your color grande, and then import it in the same color grade or another.  Let's assume that you have created a key of the skin with the HSL keyer, now in order to export the alpha you have to select Enable Ext Key, then select the mask, the source (because you are using that vector) and the A for the alpha channel. Finally, in the Export key, select if you want to export the inside of the outside of your key. Done!

From now on, you can create new layers in your color grade, if you want to use that alpha channel, go to the Output, click Enable Ext Key, Mask, and the Keysource is the "Base" if you created the alpha on the first vector, or you can use "Prev", which would be the previous vector. Now select the A for the alpha channel. Then, you can use the HSL keyer in order to combine alphas by using the buttons adding, subtracting or addl, which would be an intersect. You can even create shapes that will work the same way. You can also select the outside or the inside of this alpha with the outside or inside buttons below the keyer button.

 

image.png.7ca86d2876c16ded6567bc607612f3f9.png
Import alpha settings

 

On 4/6/2019 at 12:00 AM, jan1 said:

2) Importing external EXR sequences from another roto software. I've been able to export the EXR and create the roto mask, but am not clear how to re-import the EXR files and use them as an alpha channel.

 

 

This works the same way as importing and alpha but you have to position your EXR files below your footage. Now move down the Evaluation range of your Color Grade until it embraces the EXR file.  Then go to the Output Menu, click Enable Ext Key, on Ext Key Source click on In2. Now select the channel you want to use. I assume your EXR files are a black and white image of your rotoscope that contains an alpha channel. If they do not contain an alpha channel but the RGB channels are black and white alphas, it does not matter what channel you use. You can set below your shots even more EXR files and select from In2 to In5. Every grade you do it will only affect the white area, and you can do combinations with different alphas. 

 

image.thumb.png.d261dd50fa1039194e7d2585e7ba705f.png

 

I hope it helped. Keep posting your doubts! We are more than happy to help.  ?

Cheers,

Cristóbal

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, cbolanos@sgo.es said:

First of all, new tutorials are coming up soon. Right now, the NAB is taking most of our time. But the road map is to keep posting new ones on a daily basis. So thanks a lot for the feedback, we'll take them as suggestions for future ones. Besides, apart from these short tutorials, there are also planned webinars and long tutorials that will go on deeper in Mistika Boutique.

Thank you for the response and explanations, that makes sense. Totally understand that NAB is first priority, I was just collecting a wish list.

Also, I have found some of the older longer tutorials on Vimeo which are helpful as well.

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Will be great to get and extended tutorial on the Title tool, specifically focused on end titles with various common formats of rolling end credits. I am just playing around trying to do this in my last days with the Open Beta version. It is getting a bit challenging, specially when the text needs to be updated and other part of the title get misaligned. I think this is an important part of Finishing and deserves some clarification and “good practices” guidance.

In addition it will be great to know whats the best way of adding graphics to rolling titles, also keeping in mind proper alignment when updating sections of the text.

✌️

 

Edited by Aurora Films
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K... a bit more experimentation... some good results on doing rolling titles with custom formatting and end graphics matching the roll. Using a couple of techniques learned in other software.

 

pwd: mistik@titles

Test with three layers of text and a painted graphic. Key to matching roll was to propagate the animated roll from main title node on to the others. For the graphic roll had to use a Framing node and copy the animated Y parameter from the Title node. Was planing to do it with the Comp3D node, but the pixel values don't translate to the same Title placement... Framing values do.

A

Edited by Aurora Films
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Hi Abel 

you have the option of roll or croll inside the title tool on the right side. Of the title editor.

And it translate to key frames at the top level of the title effect. 

I use the same technic for logos or any kind of Grafix that need to be overlay  

With comp3d and tracking  

Hope it helps. Yoav

 

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For me, I find it much easier to make a long file in photoshop (eg 1920x25000) and then just bring that into Mistika and use comp3d to roll it to the correct pixel per frame duration. Laying out text in the title tool in Mistika can be quite painful at times trying to get all the formatting correct. If you save the photoshop file to a working location then for changes you can just overwrite a new file with the same name and it will update in the Mistika timeline!

Edited by rob.gordon
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I've done several end crawl credits (internships) and that's always been the case. I designed them with Photoshop, and then animate in another software. I used to it with After Effects, but I always end up having the jiggling issue of the pixels even working with expressions specifically made for avoiding that issue. However, I could sort out the problem in Mistika fiddling with the samples and the shutter until I had really smoothed end crawl credits. It always depends on the project, the speed of the animation and so on. But nothing impossible to achieve. 

PS: Awesome composition Abel! Thanks a lot for sharing. You're really mastering Boutique. Cheers!

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5 hours ago, Yoav Raz said:

you have the option of roll or croll inside the title tool on the right side. Of the title editor.

Yes, thats how I setup the initial roll... which actually creates keyframes in "MoveY" Parameter of the Title. Those values drive the rest of the Titles and Graphics. I did find I had to keep propagating and copying these a few time as I did changes. It will be great if values can be linked with expressions... if this is not implemented, consider it a feature request.

 

2 hours ago, cbolanos@sgo.es said:

I've done several end crawl credits (internships) and that's always been the case. I designed them with Photoshop, and then animate in another software. I used to it with After Effects, but I always end up having the jiggling issue of the pixels even working with expressions specifically made for avoiding that issue. However, I could sort out the problem in Mistika fiddling with the samples and the shutter until I had really smoothed end crawl credits. It always depends on the project, the speed of the animation and so on. But nothing impossible to achieve. 

 

2 hours ago, rob.gordon said:

For me, I find it much easier to make a long file in photoshop (eg 1920x25000) and then just bring that into Mistika and use comp3d to roll it to the correct pixel per frame duration. Laying out text in the title tool in Mistika can be quite painful at times trying to get all the formatting correct. If you save the photoshop file to a working location then for changes you can just overwrite a new file with the same name and it will update in the Mistika timeline!

Photoshop is good. This is just about knowing what and how easy I can do it within Boutique,

Since the Title and Framing tools motion don't have motion blur, adding a small amount vertical DirBlur to the whole thing helps with the smoothness.

PS: Thanks!

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Maybe a question for a separate topic, but since we are talking about titles... I was intending to upload the setup I used in that video by putting it in a .grp file. I realized the .grp file doesn't contain all the necessary information to recreate the title and paint node in a separate station. Internally it references a bunch of .dat files saved in the "PRIVATE/.." folder of the project. How can I package something like this to be self contained and ready to used in a different Mistika station?

A

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18 hours ago, Aurora Films said:

 

Since the Title and Framing tools motion don't have motion blur, adding a small amount vertical DirBlur to the whole thing helps with the smoothness.

 

Yes you are right about title and framing not having motion blur ? I do the same, just add a little dirblur to help.

Just an FYI, if you use a comp3d node to perform the move (or any move), in the options setting you can increase the 'samples' to x8 or more and adjust the 'shutter' variable to give you motion blur! Works nicely!

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18 hours ago, Aurora Films said:

Maybe a question for a separate topic, but since we are talking about titles... I was intending to upload the setup I used in that video by putting it in a .grp file. I realized the .grp file doesn't contain all the necessary information to recreate the title and paint node in a separate station. Internally it references a bunch of .dat files saved in the "PRIVATE/.." folder of the project. How can I package something like this to be self contained and ready to used in a different Mistika station?

A

Just save the stack as an environment and then copy that .env file to a different Mistika? Maybe you are wanting something more of a preset though? In which case save an FX preset? There will always be issues though if both Mistika's don't have the same typefaces installed. The other option is to do a dummy render and copy the .RND file to the other Mistika, then you can just drag that .RND file to the new timeline and ungroup it. (The RND files get saved into the RENDER folder of your current project)

Edited by rob.gordon
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21 hours ago, Aurora Films said:

Maybe a question for a separate topic, but since we are talking about titles... I was intending to upload the setup I used in that video by putting it in a .grp file. I realized the .grp file doesn't contain all the necessary information to recreate the title and paint node in a separate station. Internally it references a bunch of .dat files saved in the "PRIVATE/.." folder of the project. How can I package something like this to be self contained and ready to used in a different Mistika station?

A

 

There are several ways to move timelines or groups from one Mistika station to another. Rob has already mentioned a few of them. I will just list them ?

 

1. Export to a .grp file . You can see how that's done in this tutorial:

2. Just save your env., then you can copy it, open the timeline in the new Mistika station and paste it.

3. Save an FX preset: 

image.thumb.png.911733608661daa4817799046d6f8ce3.png

 

4. Make a render selection and then select the feature "Write scripts Only", which will save you a rnd:


image.png.1a1f316ccb79d5c15de6bc2441aa47af.png

 

Cheers!

Cristóbal

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On 4/11/2019 at 6:22 AM, rob.gordon said:

For me, I find it much easier to make a long file in photoshop (eg 1920x25000) and then just bring that into Mistika and use comp3d to roll it to the correct pixel per frame duration.

Great discussion, will have to play with the title tool more.

For similar reasons, my current go-to is designing the titles in Illustrator (a bit more text layout control than Photoshop), and then drop it into a Fusion animation to convert it to a ProRes4444 file that can be imported. In Fusion it was easy to create an expression for the Y coordinate that moves in even pixels. That's always the crux of animating an externally designed titles. 

In Fusion you can put this expression into the Y axis of a transform node: 'time * 0.0005 - 0.5' if you're crawl was 2000 frames long as an example. And you would make your external graphic an even multiple of the frame count, either 2x, 3x, or 4x. Is that something that Mistika can do - express values as expression that reference other data?

Haven't had a chance yet to dive deeper into the Comp3D tool beyond applying alpha channels.

But being able to do all the animation and even some text inside Mistika speeds things up rather than switching between multiple apps.

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Thank for all the suggestions about exporting the title setup. I did tried the .grp method, but that doesn’t work, as it doesn’t carry the actual text and paint strokes within... hence my post. I’ll try the other methods before I run out of open beta license ?.

Cheers

A

Edited by Aurora Films
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21 hours ago, jan1 said:

Great discussion, will have to play with the title tool more.

For similar reasons, my current go-to is designing the titles in Illustrator (a bit more text layout control than Photoshop), and then drop it into a Fusion animation to convert it to a ProRes4444 file that can be imported. In Fusion it was easy to create an expression for the Y coordinate that moves in even pixels. That's always the crux of animating an externally designed titles. 

In Fusion you can put this expression into the Y axis of a transform node: 'time * 0.0005 - 0.5' if you're crawl was 2000 frames long as an example. And you would make your external graphic an even multiple of the frame count, either 2x, 3x, or 4x. Is that something that Mistika can do - express values as expression that reference other data?

Haven't had a chance yet to dive deeper into the Comp3D tool beyond applying alpha channels.

But being able to do all the animation and even some text inside Mistika speeds things up rather than switching between multiple apps.

Yes the Comp3D can perform a similar calculation. There is a 'math' tab in the visual editor for the Comp3D node, this has a parameter for 'speed' to ensure your move does so in whole pixels. The equation is (100/vertical resolution) x (pixel per frame) x 200 so a 4ppf roll in a 1080 project would be (100/1080) x 4 x 200 = 74.07%. Highlight the position Y parameter in the layer of your file and type in the speed percentage of 74.07 in the speed box in the math tab and you will have your move rolling at whole pixels as defined in the equation. This is also assuming you have pre-calulated the duration required for the roll of the size of the file you have created, in the case above of a 4ppf roll. If you have created a file of 1920x23000 you would take the 23000+1080 (the vertical resolution of your project)/4 (the required pixel per frame) which makes a duration of 6020 frames.

 

Hopefully that makes sense!

 

 

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Regarding the example of saving the titles and paint node as a package to be used in a different Mistika station, without access to the same project... here are my findings.

Quote

1. Export to a .grp file

This doesn't work. As explained in my previous post.

Quote

2. Just save your env., then you can copy it, open the timeline in the new Mistika station and paste it.

This doesn't work ether... because of the same reasons.

Quote

3. Save an FX preset: 

This works, as it carries all necessary .dat files to recreate the titles and paint. ?

Quote

4. Make a render selection and then select the feature "Write scripts Only", which will save you a rnd:

This doesn't work.

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Maybe not a bug, but... more like something to be aware of. Remember that I am talking about sharing setups between stations with no access to each other protects. If they are accessing the same project/folder structure in the same network, the all of these will work. My question mainly came in when I was trying to post te title/paint example here in the forum and seeing that anyone here downloading it  will not be able to recreate it... unless the FX Preset is used. 

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