Processing a split screen

[Chris Northcross]

I've been playing around with After Effects and Studio Artist the last few days and I've come upon a problem I could use some help with. I've been experimenting with creating split screen animations if After Effects and would like to process the subframes in Studio Artist individually.

So far the two options I can think of are loading the movie as a movie layer, making a region selection for each subframe and then processing and recording each subframe frame by frame, rewinding and doing it all over again. Option two would be to create a region for each individual frame, processing that region, exporting it as a movie with that subframe processed, importing the video and repeating the procedure all over again on a different subframe until they were all done. Both steps are a bit time intensive (though I'm leaning towards step two right now). If anyone can think of a way that I can trim the workflow down, please sing out! Thanks!

[Synthetik]

The easiest approach would probably be to process the source footage before building a split screen composite of the processed footage in after effects.

After the fact, you could build a PASeq that includes region selection steps that mask out individual areas followed by the associated processing for that area with that processed masked. So you could build a single PASeq that processes all of the regions with their particular effects, then run the normal process a movie with a PASeq to a movie action menu to generate the processed footage. You would want to make sure you had the PASeq masking playback option turned on.

[liveart]

yeah, what John said.

Note that as a working process if you already have the paseqs you want to apply to each frame the making of the "super" Paseq is really quite simple. In v3.5 you would have your paseq and history window open. load the paseq then drag copy it to the history window until you are done. In v4 there are menu commands for copy replace and copy append to history.

In this way you do not have to try to figure out the superpaesq all at once. Design your operation, then append. Just remember that you will be doing a region selection between the steps instead of a set canvas.

[Chris Northcross]

Thanks to both of you for your help. I think masking off the individual subframe is the route I'm going to go. When I'm ready to animate the PASeq, do I need to have the 'mask' button engaged for the region selection to engage or does SA automatically recognize that?

[Synthetik]

Studio Artist 4 will play back each individual PASeq action step with the mask turned on or off base don the mask state when the action step was recorded, if you have the Mask Playback option turned on in the Editor for the PASeq preset. If this option is turned off, then the existing state of the mask is not changed when the PASeq plays back.

In previous versions of Studio Artist the mask playback option was a global preference setting. In version 4 it's a user editable parameter associated with each individual PASeq preset.

[Chris Northcross]

Excellent! That was a big help. Thanks John!