I have a request on an upcoming project to provide mattes as SVG files for the DI colorist. I’ve always done all my roto in Flame and provided rasterized mattes. Does flame even support export of roto/shape to SVG?
Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated
That’s a new one.
Does anyone support an animated mask to SVG? I’ve only used static ones from illustrator.
I was thinking that the Alpha/Matte to GMask presentation starting at 49:15 from Will Harris will result into a kind of animated mask in a vector format. Is this feature is still under development?
What system is the colorist using?
Never heard of this request from any of our Baselight, Resolve or Nucoda colorists.
Definitely new to me! On one hand, I’m a little relieved to hear that it’s not only new to me… But then again I’m still left with this challenge
That is interesting for me to hear. I have not worked with SVG files in any form yet. I suppose I just assumed they supported animation somehow, via x,y translation in the xml or something… I’ve just started my research on this, so I greatly appreciate your feedback
Thanks for sharing this link! Great demo and the prospect of ‘turning’ an matte into vector format is very exciting. In this case I’d still need to figure out how to translate that result out of flamet, though.
Baselight colorist. I know they will be in touch with filmlight regarding getting SVG files into BL.
Colorists should be grateful if they get any masks from vfx. I try to provide them, even separate overlapping mattes combined in RGB channels, for fewer files.
They usually go with a circle gmask and soften it to hell - like the power windows feature in the old telecine systems…
A little research has shown that it can be animated, but I have yet to find anything that says it can carry any transparency or softness data. I’d love to play with this today. I personally have the time but my machine is tied up archiving.
I, myself, won’t be able to be hands on in my flame until after the holiday weekend. Was just hoping to maybe glean some starting points by posing the question here first- in the case that others might already have more familiarity than i do
Something bigger is at issue here. How can you use a vector matte with a bitmap image? $5 says the information was in a copy pasta somewhere and this makes absolutely no sense.
Once had a colorist ask for a matte made from stop motion animation of a paper towel over top a piece of black construction paper that we would need to painstakingly animate so it synced up to the comp. Took weeks to get it right, he kept kicking it back for edge issues and ‘matte lines.’ We said, can’t we just give you a exr, dpx, tiff, etc that was generated from the comp… no dice, it was all part of his ‘process.’ But dude’s a genius, got like 25k followers on IG, his time is super precious and it was an honor to even just be included at the end of the day.
(Sorry, couldn’t help myself here…)
That all being said in all sarcasm, good luck with this and hope you find a solution! I personally hope Randy’s right and the fix is very much just a conversation/ clarification and not some journey down a hugely complex route for a pretty simple and routine need.
I agree. I work with the three main color grading systems, and never have heard of this. Sounds like a syntax error.
the colorist is very clear about what he is hoping for. he began his request by defining two types of matte, as rasterized or as vectorized, so as to be very clear about which he is hoping to be able to work with for this specific project.
i am in the longform conform camp of flame users, which means i live 90% of my life in the timeline and the type of vfx work i do is usually along the lines of cleanup, removals, split takes, beauty work… all that to say i understand what he is asking for but i am ignorant to the possibilities of it and thought maybe someone much smarter than me here would have dealt with something like this before. but it seems to me very likely that the request is something that will not be able to be able to be accomodated in flame- which i did suspect but thought it was worth asking.
to veer off topic a bit- i will admit to a sneaking suspicion of mine that he is knowingly asking the impossible to be able to say, ‘see, flame isn’t sufficient for my conform needs… therefore you must conform in baselight’ more and more colorists want the conform to happen right in their box. (and yes, in the course of conversation the flame/lustre wiretap workflow did come up. you never appreciate what you have until it’s gone…)
SVG files can be imported.
The SVG vector format allows the colorist the ability to manipulate the shape(s) in Baselight.
I can see the advantage of this, but never have seen any colorist request this, or use it!
From the brochure….
This can be used to import annotations from photogrammetry platforms such as PIX, and allows a lot
of simple effects to be created quickly in the grading suite, cutting out back and forth with the VFX department and saving you time and money.
Copy and paste this part and send it to any colourist that wants SVGs. Then tell them the feature was meant to cut out the back and forth with vfx so that the colourists can do it themself—it says so I’m the brochure.
Then tell the offending party that if they were on Resolve they could literally one button click ML roto and mic drop.
Then send an anonymous package with spiders in it.
Gorilla shit.