I am new to LW, please bear with me.  I recently built two animations
using 3DACT, both using eps files.  Upon rendering and compositing into
VT4, I find that I cannot see the lens flare over my video.  I can see
the effect of the light source (ie. reflection on the letters) but I
cannot see the lens flare itself.  If I turn the "overlay" off on the
timeline, I can see all of the flare over black.  It seems that the
flares are not being cut through the video.  Is this by design, a
problem, or am I doing something wrong?

By the way, other than not seeing to flares, the results look good.

Any ideas?

audiobarry wrote:
> I am new to LW, please bear with me.  I recently built two animations
> using 3DACT, both using eps files.  Upon rendering and compositing into
> VT4, I find that I cannot see the lens flare over my video.  I can see
> the effect of the light source (ie. reflection on the letters) but I
> cannot see the lens flare itself.  If I turn the "overlay" off on the
> timeline, I can see all of the flare over black.  It seems that the
> flares are not being cut through the video.  Is this by design, a
> problem, or am I doing something wrong?
>
> By the way, other than not seeing to flares, the results look good.
>
> Any ideas?

I received an answer from NewTek.
Hi Barry,
Sorry for the problem.
You will have to re render these scenes after turning on a filter
In layout, after scene is loaded
Go to the "window" popup in upper left
go to "Image Processing"

Maybe this will help someone else.
Use the "Add Image Filter" popup at the bottom and choose "Flare2Alpha"
Then re render the scene
Flares will now show up.

Hi audiobarry,

welcome to LW! ;-)

In Layout push shift+F8 to open the effects panel
click on add image filter and scroll though to Flare2Alpha
Then render your animation as an image sequence with alpha
e.g. TGA32
This should do the trick.

greetz
dasra


"audiobarry" <barry.bailey@charter.net> a �crit dans le message de news: 
1152287224.398716.254400@s53g2000cws.googlegroups.com...
>I am new to LW, please bear with me.  I recently built two animations
> using 3DACT, both using eps files.  Upon rendering and compositing into
> VT4, I find that I cannot see the lens flare over my video.  I can see
> the effect of the light source (ie. reflection on the letters) but I
> cannot see the lens flare itself.  If I turn the "overlay" off on the
> timeline, I can see all of the flare over black.  It seems that the
> flares are not being cut through the video.  Is this by design, a
> problem, or am I doing something wrong?
>
> By the way, other than not seeing to flares, the results look good.
>
> Any ideas?
> 

Err, sort-of.

Lens flares aren't really suposed to show up in the alpha channel.

The method they gave you will sort-of work, but not very well.
If your background is dark, then your lens flares will go from
bright in the middle to the background color. So, if your
background is black, then your lens flares will have a dark halo
around them, unless you composite them against a nearly black
background. The only way around that is to make your background
white (or an appriate color to match your flare color. That way it
will fade from white to transparent white at the edges. This is about
all you can do with a simple key. The sad part is that anything from
the composite that passes behind the flare will be obscured.
not the very best way to go.

you should be able to see through lens flares though. The should
make anything behind the flare look brighter, not just be obscured.
This means that the value of the flare should be added (lightened)
to to the background plate. You can do this in two passes by
rendering as you have been doing it (no flares in the alpha), and
then "Add" the foreground to the background without using the
alpha channel. Anything in the forground plate will make anything
under it brighter. This is just what you want for a flare, but not for
the items that were suposed to be solid or just transparent. The
solution is to do another pass with the normal alpha channel active.
By doing this all of your solid things will be solid.

Most compositing programs have some means of doing both
of these steps in a single pass. In After Effects it is called
"Luminecent Premultiplied".

David