Ok, thanks!
Next question - how can I render out what I see?
I need to render out red or green or blue "as grayscale". I need this to improve tracking in the Mocha planar tracker, which I use a lot. A certain object, which may be almost indistinguishable from the background in RGB, may stand out very well in one of the color channels, this makes Mocha track the object much better.
Ingvar

You can do this with the Color Curves FX. Select each channel that you don't want in turn and drag the top right node down to the bottom right. Save as presets. You can also do this with the Channel Blend FX, once you open it, it should be obvious enough how to do this.

Bob.

The convolution kernel has a bump map and edge detection, and operates on all three or single color channels. I use it sometimes to make "neon" looking effects, but if all you need is a "wire frame" type outline, can't hurt to try it.

You can snap a still and take it into PS or whatever for a lot more options just to see if the strategy is doeable.

This gives me a great idea about creating motion and garbage masks without going through the bezier curve keyframe headache thingy. That's what you're trying to do right?

And I think you've hit on a the missing link, which is ability to supply an external program with a stickframe to fill.

This thing has been bugging me for a long time. The cartooner plugins use the convolution kernel to make an "illustration" or line art which is akin to vector graphics.

I wonder if an illustrator program can trace the cartooned images in a video.

It's impossible to reliably trace an outline of an object. It seems one of the very high end chroma keyers does this but that can only work because there's avery distinct known reference color for it to work from It's no doubt very CPU intensive and the plugin costs big time.

What Mocha does is different and more advanced than a planar mask. It can pretty much rebuild the 3D world that was in front of the camera by tracking points. Then you can remove unwanted objects from the shot, assuming what's behind them was visible to the camera at some point in time. Certainly worth a visit to Imagineer's site to watch some of the tutorials. Being able to do this was in the realm of science fiction a few years ago, then it was only Hollywood with massive computational power that could do it and today we can do it on desktop PCs.

Bob.

> It's impossible to reliably trace an outline of an object
Yes, you are right I believe.

> What Mocha does is different and more advanced
Are you sure it is Mocha you are talking about here, and not Monet / Mokey?
Ingvar

"Are you sure it is Mocha you are talking about here, and not Monet / Mokey?"

You could be right, both from the same company. I watch too many demos and tutorials of things I can't afford and even if I could I'd never find the work to justify.

Bob.

I'm wondering if a chain of Chroma Key filters, combined with an initial cookie cutter type mask to limit the scope, and that moves with the target could provide something useful.

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It's impossible to reliably trace an outline of an object. It seems one of the very high end chroma keyers does this but that can only work because there's avery distinct known reference color for it to work from

Bob:
>You can do this with the Color Curves FX.

Actually, I got better results using three levels (one Red, one Green, one Blue) and an HSL adjust setting Saturation to 0 and Luminance to 2. Curves, for a reason I do not understand, produce some nasty artifacts.
Anyhow, by doing this, I can achieve what I want. And I can save the array as a preset. And I can render out a single channel as grayscale. But it is not as streamlined as I wish. I hope there is an FX out there which allows me do do this in one step - preview and render one channel as grayscale, in one operation, with one FX.
Ingvar

I cannot understand why the curves were giving you a problem either. Of course selecting just the red channel will expose the chroma sampling issue but there's no way to avoid that.

If you want one plug that should give you Y' = Red then the Channel Blend FX should do it for you. Try this.

R = 1.00R
G = 1.00R
B = 1.00R

All other values at 0.00

Bob.