Process Overview Part Four

Process point four: Individualizing

Now that I had the template made, all I had to do was treat the rest of the footage with Key Light and import it into the project. The green screen footage used for this section was shot in two parts, the first being the look-up-cross-arms section in the beginning, the second being the turn-around-catch-ball section in the end. I split these two sections up after importing, made sure they were still being masked, and timed them out to switch right as the light explodes around them (an effect made possible by another plug-in called Knoll Light Factory). Once I had the footage in there, I changed the text and added the composition to the render que. I would wait to render all these at once, since rendering is CPU intensive and I didn’t have time to just wait around.

I ran into a few things I needed to change after I reviewed the rendered footage, and made appropriate changes to the individual composition before re-rendering. This was a time-intensive process, since there is no real way to get a complete full frame RAM preview in After Effects on my diminutive laptop. I mostly worked in half to quarter resolution with 50% screen size to quicken the process, and relied on these periodic renderings to check for full resolution quality.