Problems in After Effects

It's been a while since I’ve worked in After Effects, as I don't have it on my laptop. This in itself was quite problematic as due to the lack of accessibility and practice I had to re-learn everything to jog my memory with the application. This also made my progress with keying out my green-screen footage very slow progressing but I eventually got there in the end.

After sorting out my corrupted video files (note to self, do not work off hard drive) I resized them and put them in sequence according to my initial storyboard and then got to work with keying out each shot. After going through it step by step, keying is actually very simple and quite fun. Key framing the mask around the actor was a bit tedious though because, we had cello tape on the green-screen for tracking purposes, which the keying process doesn’t get rid of so I had to try, avoid it while animating the mask. This wasn't all that successful either so, there are some clips in which the tracking marks are visible. Next time I do any filming I’ll be sure to take them off unless I require them for any of my shots.

With the entire footage ready, I returned to Maya and rendered out my shots. To help me get the right angle for my actor, I imported the footage as an image sequence which I assigned onto a plane which, I then positioned roughly where I wanted my actor to be stood. The image sequence didn't work for whatever reason but, the still image of Tim still worked just as well and enabled me to position the camera correctly from which, I then rendered out my scene.

I later noticed after animating the masks, that in the majority of the shots, Tim's feet clip out and disappear which, is obviously a fault when filming and is something I cannot change. Because of this, I decided to change from a wide shot to a mid shot making Tim visible from the knees up hiding the problems with his feet. For this I obviously had to re-render my Maya scene for a closer shot and I re-scaled Tim to fit accordingly.