After Effects 7.0

While doing some rotoscoping for TFII I noticed that my retouched clips looked funny upon bringing them back into Vegas. I understood that this is because Vegas uses “studio RGB” (aka ITU-R BT.601, limiting luma to 16 < Y < 235) while After Effects 7.0 does not. To be more precise, what happens is that Vegas uses its own DV codec, while After Effects, opens the same file with the maligned Microsoft DV codec. An editing codec should be fast, capture as much information and suffer as little generation loss as possible. Sony’s DV codec is good, by this measure. You could dumb Vegas down to use Microsoft’s DV codec, but there is a better way.

To work around the problem, I convert my DV clips to something lossless like huffyuv or MSU Lossless Video Codec. Unfortunately this means that Vegas comes to a halt when try to play the rotoscoped clips, due to their size, but it is burden with which I am willing to live. If I were more lazy I could use Vegas to convert those clips back to its own DV format, but I do not want to incur another generation loss. Once rotoscoped, the footage can be exported to an alternative DV codec, such as Mainconcept’s, if you wish to avoid Microsoft’s.

After Effects CS3

New to CS3 is end-to-end color management. This means, for instance, that you can assign a color space to your imported footage and preview it on your calibrated monitor, just like you can in Vegas.

You can enable it from File>Project Settings by selecting an appropriate working space under the Color Settings section. Do not forget to use enable Use Display Color Management from the View menu. Veteran Photoshop users will know that the View menu also houses the Soft Proof feature, which in After Effects has been renamed to the simpler Simulate Output. If you go into the Custom… section of the menu item, After Effects allows you to perform color space conversion between a respectable list of films and devices. Video has finally caught up with photography in color management!

When I select SDTV NTSC 16-235 and enable RGB 16-235 in the Mainconcept DV codec’s settings I get retouched clips that seamlessly blend in upon being re-imported in Vegas:

Conclusion

In practice I simply import my clips into After Effects CS3 with the Microsoft codec, and set the color space to SDTV NTSC 16-235 and it looks just like it does in Vegas. Instead of using the Mainconcept DV codec to export I use lagarith, which is lossless. This makes a visible difference in retaining chroma information.

Next week I will explain how to do rotoscoping in Photoshop CS3.