eureka...finally figured out mattes in Avid

[sean90291]

I was feeling stupid. I couldn't get how mattes and luma keys worked in Avid. I had never had any Photoshop training, so the whole concept of mattes and masks and compositing was entirely foreign. It still is, pretty much. But I finally had a eureka moment when I figured out how to create a matte and then use fill and background to do a composite within Avid. I also finally learned how to accomplish this in After Effects (which led me to understand Avid better) but was NOT at all happy with the After Effects results when I brought them back into Avid Xpress. As hard as I tried (trying to render as targa sequences, QT movies and uncompressed AVI files too) I was getting a very noisy and unsatisfactory result. Maybe I'm the only one who would have noticed, but I found the flickery, noisy results of importing After Effects rendered compositing to be unacceptable. Much happier with the results when I do right within Avid.