Rendering Sequences for Later Compositing

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‌Rendering Sequences for Later Compositing ‌

The tracking results provided by SynthEyes will not produce a match within your animation or compositing package unless that package also uses the same padded, stabilized, resampled, and undistorted footage that SynthEyes tracked. This is also true of SynthEyes’s perspective window.

Tip: Save Sequence can also include a simple render of the meshes in your scene, for previewing with still-distorted footage. It is also useful for rendering quick inserts in 360 VR footage, since the perspective view doesn't use 360 VR views. Normally, use the perspective view for better renders with motion blur and control over antialiasing.

Use the Save Sequence button on the Image Preprocessor dialog’s Output tab to save the processed sequence. If the source material is 16 bit, you can save the results as 16 bit or 8 bit. You can also elect whether or not to save an alpha channel, if present. If the source has an alpha channel, but you are not given the option to save it, open the Edit Shot dialog and turn on the Keep Alpha checkbox.

Important: If you have a 16-bit/channel or floating point image source, and wish to output that 16-bit or floating point sequence, be sure that the Process Depth and Store Depth settings on the Shot Setup panel are set to that depth! By default, they are set to 8 bit for speedy tracking, which will make your imagery noisy!

Output file formats include ASF, AVI, BMP, Cineon, DPX, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, ProRes™, Quicktime, SGI, Targa, TIFF, and WMV. Details of supported number of bits per channel, compression formats, and alpha availability vary with format and platform. Those settings will be available for later reuse if the same file extension is selected.

Tip : You can select an image processor prepset to be temporarily applied when writing the image sequence. For example, it can remove Log to 709 or

gamma corrections you’ve made while tracking, so rendered footage matches the original, or it can apply or remove resolution changes for proxy renders or if you are tracking a proxy.

Tip : You can set a default file type and compression settings for Save Sequence in the Image Output section of preferences. If the Keep last settings button is checked (which it is by default), the preferences will be updated each time you save a sequence, for use the next time you save a sequence. Turn the checkbox off to set a permanent set of defaults.

If you have stabilized the footage, you will want to use this stabilized footage subsequently.

However, if you have only removed distortion, you have an additional option that maximized image quality and minimizes the amount of changes made to the original footage: you can take your rendered effects and run them back through the image preprocessor (or maybe your compositing package) to re-introduce the distortion and cropping specified in the image preprocessor panel, using the Apply It checkbox.

This redistorted footage can then be composited with the original footage, preserving the match.

The necessary complexity of this workflow is an excellent argument for using high-quality lenses and avoiding excessively wide fields of view (short focal lengths).

You can also use the Save Sequence dialog to render an alpha mask version of the roto-spline information and/or green-screen keys.

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