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Last time we took a quick look at Digital Film Tools Power Matte for After Effects this time we will dig a little deeper with some hairy examples. I am going to take you through a quick example that should yield some pretty detailed results. First off I grabbed a image I had lying around no pun intended of this big gorilla which I chose for the complexity that hair can give with getting clean matte extraction.I made a new standard NTSC composition bringing in my 2 images of the gorilla and my background of the beach and made sure to bring it in as a Single Composition.
Make it easy by dragging the image to the comp icon in the project panel.
Next I went on to create 3 separate open masks using the Pen tool for the areas I wanted to keep and for the area I wanted to get rid of. Sometimes you may have more then just a few masks but that all depends on your images/footage.
After generating the masks I can then apply the Power Matte effect to the the layer.
Once the effect loads you will want to tell Power Matte what masks it will use for the foreground and the background in this case I want the inner mask 1 to be my foreground mask and mask 2 to be my background. Well what about mask 3 you ask , well in After Effects and Power Matte you have the option to link the masks since you can only choose between 1 mask for the foreground and one for the background .You will be able to see all your masks but can only choose 1 for each .
Linking the masks in easy , you can shift select the layers/masks you want Power Matte to link and under options in the effect panel you can choose either to link by Mask Color or Mask Name.
When you have the masks linked change your view source to check the matte , trimap or output. You may have to Force Update when switching the views for the effect update to preview correctly depending on what resolution you are working at.
Here is the Matte view check out the hair detail which with out the plug in you would be going into the different color channels crushing different colors until you could get something even close to this .
And here is the final Comp.
Normally this would have taken a few passes from different effects,duplicate layers and some parameter tweaking .
This took me all of 4 minutes to get this clean image. If you are wondering what this can do for your images go to the site and download the demo and see how quick, easy and powerful it is.
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Jim Geduldick is a freelance editor, motion graphic artist, post production engineer and cinematographer. He got he start with editing and cinematography by filming friends skateboarding and snowboarding back in the days of High 8 cameras. Jim co-leads AENY(After Effects NY) http://aeny.org. He is also a moderator at Toolfarm.com and has a blog finalcutuser.com with his buddy Nate. When he isn't stuck behind a monitor he can be found teaching his son to skateboard, nerding out with his music collection and spending to much money on vinyl toys.Related Sites: Creative Mac , Digital Producer , Digital Animators , Animation Artist , Siggraph News , Digital Media Designer , Oceania , MacAnimationPro , MacDesignPro , After Effects
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