Cryptomatte is a clever improvement over OpenEXR’s ID channels, which have been supported by ProEXR since the beginning, but in practice are rarely used. The problem with an ID channel is that each pixel can only specify a single ID, so small things like antialiasing, motion blur, and depth of field won’t work properly. Using some tricks involving 32-bit float EXR channels and cryptographic hashes, Cryptomatte gives you the ID channels you always wanted, fully functional. Just turn on Cryptomatte in a supported 3D renderer, set up the comps in After Effects using ProEXR AE, select the Cryptomatte effect, and click in your comp to generate perfect mattes for any object(s) you choose.
Since Cryptomatte uses a series of EXR channels to work its magic, developing this plug-in exposed some inefficiencies in the OpenEXR file module, which has now been updated to always cache channels and headers. In extreme cases involving EXR sequences with many channels, the speedup can be as high as 20x. I encourage all multi-channel EXR enthusiasts to replace the plug-in that ships with AE.
Enjoy!
Update: More information about this release and Cryptomatte in a ProVideo Coalition article by Chris Zwar!
9 comments:
My latest After Effects 2019 (16.0.1) is still very slow with your Cryptomatte 2.0 applied on EXR sequences.
The same EXR but single frame are a lot faster. Is there a trick to circumvent the AF EXR bug? Any AE settings needed?
What is the proper location to install the Cryptomatte and Pro plug ins? The docs did not explicitly state the proper location, and the language surrounding it was on the ambiguous side. Thanks!
same here with vangel, despite reading the slowness on after effects was sorted.. still no workable on latest after effects.. using the latest proEXR plugin
thanks
What Vangel and sulkybunny wrote I can confirm. The Cryptomate plugin takes about 10sec for a 1080p Frame to generate a matte (AE CC2018) while other EXR Channels load much faster. Is that normal behaviour?
Thanks for your great work Bryan - we owe you!
thanks for your work. sorry to say it, but I think that the latest AE 16.1 update re-broke the workaround you have implemented. it took me 8 hours to render out the 15 seconds sequence with two cryptomatte layers and nothing much else
I'm using you excellent plugins for years, and as an old ProEXR customer I would like to ask you if Cryptomatte will be also supported in your Photoshop plugins in the future? If this is not yet planned, please consider this as a feature request... Happy to pay an upgrade fee, as I guess there's lot's of work involved...
I noticed that the Exr-IO plug-in added Cryptomatte support. What they do is create a layer for every possible Cryptomatte object, which could potentially add hundreds of layers, depending on the scene. Would you want that? I'd have it as an option you could enable with a checkbox.
The ideal solution would be a Cryptomatte plug-in that let you select objects with a GUI like the AE plug-in does, but making such a thing would be a lot more work in Photoshop and I don't have time to embark on such a project.
Is it possible to get something like the EXR-IO-behaviour in After Effects, namely automatically get a composition for every Cryptomatte object?
I have written a small script that does that with RGB mattes, so if there is scripting access to the Cryptomatte effect, maybe I can alter the script accordingly. Would that be possible? Is there a documentation for the scripting access to Cryptomatte in AE somewhere?
Thanks,
Bob
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