SA 4 training videos?

[Chris Northcross]

Wondering if there's going to be a revamped set of training videos for Studio Artist 4 and if so, when we might expect them?

If requests are being taken, I'd love to see a video or two on how to create an animated selection based on the different source color and texture inputs.

[Synthetik]

Can you explain a little more about what you mean by an 'animated selection'?

[keith Ingersoll]

Version 4.x training videos would be very welcome here. those for the previous version 3.x were GREAT. Are these(v.4) ready?
I have played now I need some formal guidance.

[Chris Northcross]

I guess I'm interested in a travelling matte that is generated on a frame by frame basis. When I create a selection I generally use the source color and texture inputs as well as the lasso too. I'd like to see a video that talks about how to create a selection procedurally using the selection tools as well as image operations.

[Synthetik]

Here's an introductory tip on selection and masking. But it doesn't really cover what you are looking for, so we'll try to get another tip up that does.

The trick with traveling mattes is that the local and global growth options are based on mouse positioning at mouse down and subsequent movement to define the range of selection. And those parameters are what gets interpolated when you keyframe the selection operation in a PASeq timeline. The global color growth option records the actual color and color range used for the selection, and interpolates that in a timeline.

There's a new growth option we've been playing with called local path that is in 4.02 for source selection growth. You draw a path and the selection is based on the color sampling across the entire path. For that one the path is what gets interpolated between keyframe positions.

The lasso selection is pretty straight forward for keyframe interpolating. The one thing to keep in mind is to maintain rotational symmetry as far as how the lasso region path is drawn over time. So if you draw in a region using a clockwise outline, do the same thing for your other keyframes. If you switch to going counter-clockwise for the next keyframe then the 2 lasso paths will interpolate in an undesirable way. You can watch the selection interpolate to see what i mean by this.

[Synthetik]

There will be some version 4 training videos appearing over time. I expect they will start trickling out soon.

[Chris Northcross]

I have a shot that starts off with a locked down shot of an empty road and then has a bus that rolls through the frame from left to right until the frame is left empty once again. I've been trying to figure out the best way to build a travelling matte for the bus haven't met up with anything that works. I'm thinking of taking the shot into After Effects, building a matte for it there, exporting it out as an alpha channel and then bringing the whole thing back into Studio Artist.

My big issue is I don't have an time cost effective strategy for creating the matte in Studio Artist. I think I know how to do it on a frame by frame basis but that's more time than I'd like to spend on that task when faster alternatives are available. The shape of the bus doesn't change very much for most of the shot (save for the front of the bus and the back of the bus both appearing and disappearing at different points)

As I started working through this problem, I realized that I don't have a very good sense of how to use the selection tools well with video. In the training video the selection created is used for a single image. I'd like to see a training video that explores/explains how to use the selection tools on an image sequence /video clip.