Transparent Aftereffects masks

[Arcane Azmadi]

I had a problem recently in a video I'm making. I needed to export some clips into Aftereffects and put masks around the people in the shots to remove the background so I could insert it back into the project timeline in Premiere. That went fine, but when I exported it from Aftereffects, the background was black, making it useless in Premiere. I checked, but I couldn't find a way to make an Aftereffects project with a transparent background, so in the end I had to run the whole shot into Aftereffects and set it up there, which was very inefficient (plus I lost a few frames when I reexported from Aftereffects again, god knows why). Anyway, is there actually a way to make an Aftereffects project that can make clips with transparent backgrounds for use in other programs, or am I always going to have to do this the hard way?

for exporting as a quicktime

EXPORT SETTINGS ->

MILLIONS COLOURS +

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WaZ.

[JWRL]

When you select "Make Movie" for "Output Module" select "Make Template". In the Settings Name box give it a name you will recognise, eg. "QT animatte" and click on the edit button.

Select as your format "Quicktime Movie" uncheck Audio Output and click on the Format Options button. In the box at the top of the Compression Settings window select "Animation" from the dropdown list and for Depth select "Millions of Colors+". If it isn't already drag the Quality slider across to Best.

Now click on the "OK" button in the various windows until you are back at the render queue box and your done. Not only that but next time you will already have your prebuilt custom Output Module, so you won't need to set one up again.

One final thing. This will create an uncompressed image file, which by definition can be very large. Make sure that you have enough space available!

[E_Tedeschi]

If using Premiere (up to 6.5 anyway), the clip may not display transparency in the timeline automatically. You need to stick it on V2 for starters (no transparency on V1), and right-click to set the transparency to read the Alpha (transparency) channel. My terminology might be a bit off - it's been a while since I has to suffer through a comp in Premiere!

FWIW, you will also find that comping the whole shot is After FX will give you a far better quality render / result than within Premiere.

e.