Stylize Node

While I have yet to find a reason to use it professionally, the results that the presets give are outstanding.

In a nutshell, it will give you what you always wanted Photoshop's "make it look like a painting/drawing/newspaper" plugins to give you.

Really really outstanding stuff, and if I was running a one-man flame show I would be attempting to blast out as many ads that use the basic presets as possible. Great looking jobs in three days or less!

Node Highlight: RGB Blur

Pretty dumb node for my first node highlight you say?

Nay!

RGB Blur is a lifesaver!

It's first and primary duty is to smoth out gmask shapes. Gmasks always have a linear gradient which leaves a hard line at both the black and white ends of it. It completely sucks and there's no way to turn it off (Nuke, by contrast, has multiple gradient settings for gmasks), so what you do is pipe said mask into an RGB Blur and blur it up. Do it by eye. When the hard edge goes away, you win! Completely necessary.

The only thing that sucks about this is when you have to blur past the edge of the frame, which, because the blur doesn't have an imagination, will produce results that are less than ideal--vignettes for example tend to get this problem but are still better looking blurred than not.

Similarly, the "use matte" isn't all that useful as it will blur in areas outside of the matte (which is completely understandable, but makes it so you might as well just logic op-blend your shit together vs blurring through a matte) If you want to blur inside of a matte and not suck in the outside-of-matte areas, Sapphire's "Matte Blur" does a nice job of this.

In fact, the regular sapphire blur is probably generally nicer than the stock blur, but I think it's bad policy to use plugins when they aren't specifically necessary.

Making the Master Keyer Work for You.

The Master Keyer's pretty sweet. You know this, and I know this. It has one glaring issue as I see it, and that is the inability to input a gmask or axillary matte. It handles foreground/background integration very well, but it's rather rare that said foreground is without tracking markers and other crap that needs to get masked out. Only you can't mask it out because there's no gmask input so you're totally effed!

There's a simple fix.

Make your cleanup mask and comp the average color of your chroma-key screen (i usually just use a CC to get the RGB value or pick if off the little proxy in Batch) through that matte over your key-in footage. I usually do it over the foreground layer as well, but should you have a graded foreground and a flat key-in, just comp the graded version of that same blue.

Now, when you run the MK you'll get all that blue removed automatically and get to use the sweet foreground/background tools. I used this trick to get great soft edges off a completely out of focus dude yesterday.

Bottom Five Nodes/Features February

1. Desktop "Compositor" and "Quick Comp". Compositor is a watered down Action that actually takes longer because you have to up the resolution to see anything worthwhile. Using it is like staring through a time warp. I saw Mike Semour fire it up once in an FXPHD course, but I'm willing to guess it was for novelty alone. There is absolutely no reason to keep this archaic alternate way to skin a cat in the software. Quick Comp sucks as well because it's just a Logic Op Blend, but has only like two features. I suppose if you are afraid of Batch and can't be bothered to divide your fills, then this guy is your lazy-assed bread and butter.

2. Desktop Logic Op. I've got a bit of an axe to grind with the Desktop buttons in general. Prior to Batch they made sense, but now that all those features and many more are available in Batch, and you can preview your results, animate your results and everything else, the use for desktop Logic Opping is mininal and could probably be grouped with Quick Comp and others.

3. The lack of a color warper on the desktop. Yeah, I know it's inside the CC node, but that is a huge pain, mostly because any CW setup you save off the desktop goes into your CC folder and you have to go hunting for it, should you load said setup into a CW in the MK or Batch.

4. The Keyer. Seriously, I hate it. Use the nodes in Batch. As a bit of an aside, why the hell does the MK name the output "keyresult" even after you've named the setup. That's just silly. Fuck both these nodes. Use Batch.

5. Action's particle system. I've just finished a job where I used particles reasonably heavily. Said job also got me to be an expert on faking particles, since using the system in Flame is convoluted. I'll write another post about why I think it's so important that this feature get updated, otherwise this bullet point is going to be seven paragraphs.

Top Five Nodes February

1. Sapphire Warps. Specifically the "Bubble" warp. Holy mother is it useful. The default makes it look like ass (see also: many other Sapphire defaults) and a reasonably useless random distort. But if you dial the octaves up, then mess with the frequency and aplitude you get controllable and scalable fractal edges. It's great for making gmask shapes organic and noising up edges at high frequencies. At low frequencies, it's great for general distorts.

All around, just fantastic for getting some organic nature into your comps.

2. Matte Curves. This really should be on my top five for December, but this is the first post, and Matte Curves are totally sweet. They're basically a glorified "blend" logic op. The curves affect the gamma in your foreground and background mattes. Whenever your key's edges are just a little too dark or light tweak this before you start wading through edge erodes, flashes and blurs. I've had it save some nearly impossible keys.

3. Batch Paint. Much like the modular keyer and batch and all the "nodey" stuff, people are generally scared of Batch Paint. I know I didn't use it for years. That's a shame, because it's awesome. While it doesn't have all the features of desktop paint (autopaint, some of the wash modes) it's so much better. You can add layers, clone from layers, repo layers, scale them. Then you can swap your inputs and all the effects are still applied. Works great in proxy mode to boot. Never have to re-paint something because a grade changed again. Always always always start with batch paint now.

4. Color Warper. I used to be about 50/50 on the CC/CW front in my setups. Lately I've been going more to the warper. Most of my work involves some look creation, and it's so much faster to whip around the trackballs, pull secondaries and bend gamma curves in the CW. The CC's still a great node, but for trying out different color looks, the CW is number one. (or four)

5. Sapphire Textures. Substance Noise is a nice addition, but it's still rather clunky in it's interface (loading different textures as opposed to a drop down menu), and few of the textures animate in any useful way--most just break up into layers. Sapphire, the old standby, again, has awful defaults, but once the octaves are dialed up and the frequency adjusted, Textures really shines. The basic "Folded" is my favorite and the one I use 80% of the time, but the others can come in handy from time to time as well.