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scotts10901231
Participant
May 13, 2018
Question

Proxy video is not animating

  • May 13, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 672 views

Hi, I'd appreciate help with the following:

Problem: Proxy video is not animating.

Situation description:

4k video of subject in front of green screen giving a commentary.  I want to key out the green to infinite white, then animate the subject to move to the left off screen and then back to the right to appear center screen throughout the video.  This is to make way for other text and graphics to appear on screen.  Steps:

1) crop the video with pen tool and key out the green screen to white - done

2) move and scale subject to appear nicely in the center of the screen from chest up to head - done

3) create proxy of the composition because my computer cannot keep up with a 4k video and stutters on playback badly.  I use quarter quality (960x540) which plays back smoothly - done

4) create transform>position>key frames to animate the video of the subject to move off and onto screen, use Easy Ease In tool to make the animation smooth.

PROBLEM: when I try and play back the composition with the proxy enabled, the subject DOES NOT move to left and then back on-screen.  Only the outline of the video moves (the pen tool line I created to crop the video) can be seen to move.  The main video of the subject does not move.  If I unselect the proxy, the video moves off screen and then back on but stutters terribly because of the 4k size (and my weak computer).  I need to work with the proxy for usability but I also need it to follow the animation path so I can work with the screen area to create the other charts and text in that space (the reason I wanted the subject video to move away in the first place).

Can anyone please advise me what I'm doing wrong?  The effect I am going for is depicted well in this video: The Algebra of Happiness - YouTube

Thanks

Scott

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2 replies

Roei Tzoref
Roei Tzoref
Legend
May 13, 2018

if you do want to use proxy anyway, like M said, you should create the proxy for the footage itself, not the composition it is in. right click on the footage in the project panel, create proxy->movie. but this means all the processing will be on the proxy so effects like keying will probably give you different results on low res video vs high res video.

if you use effects that are very dependent on image quality, such as Keying effects, you proxy workflow would not serve you well. you should perform the keying operation on the highest quality of video, bare with the slowness, and when you are done you can pre-render this composition so you won't have to calculate it each time. (using a high-res lossless proxy is an efficient workflow for doing that).

if your 4k video does not run smooth, check if it's a compressed video. if it is, you might want to transcode it to something like jpg sequence which will run very fast, or a container format like Quicktime Animation.

S
scotts10901231Author
Participant
May 14, 2018

Okay, thanks for the help.  I think the workflow I need is as you suggest, create a composition with original source video, key clean it, and then pre-render it, and then work with that video (or a proxy of that video) in the rest of my animations to retain the quality of the key cleaner.

HOWEVER, when I try this workflow, using an original source mp4 video key cleaned and trimmed to 1 minute 3840x2160 video (H.264), the pre-render to uncompressed AVI video took almost 2 hours on my i7-6600U 2 Core, 16GB RAM Lenovo X1 Yoga laptop.  This can't be right, the pre-render for a 30 min video would take 60 hours!?  What am I doing wrong?  Is there a fast way to do this?

Roei Tzoref
Roei Tzoref
Legend
May 14, 2018
the pre-render to uncompressed AVI video

no no. I really don't understand why we even have this useless AVI option in the output module. to create a digital intermediate (virtually lossless) version use Quicktime Animation or Quicktime Gopro Cineform 4 (10bit) or Quicktime DnxHR.

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
May 13, 2018

Your answer is here:

3) create proxy of the composition

Of course a comp-based proxy will have everything already baked in. Your workflow simply doesn't make much sense. You need to create a proxy for the source footage item.

Mylenium

S
scotts10901231Author
Participant
May 13, 2018

Thank-you for the reply.

I thought I have to do the green screen keyer first on the high quality video before creating the proxy.  If I create the proxy on the source, won't the green screen effects run on the low quality proxy?  Or do I just create those effects with the proxy unchecked, and then only "check" the proxy on when I work on the animation?  Your help with sorting out my workflow would be very appreciated.

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