ShotAnvil Documentation
CoreMelt ShotAnvil is a powerhouse plugin combining tracked paint, masks and graphics inserts together with one click AI person keying, all in a single plugin. There is a set of video tutorials and a hotkey list, we'll refer to both during this documentation.
Introduction: What is ShotAnvil
ShotAnvil is a power house plugin combining tracked paint, masks and graphics inserts together with one click AI person keying, all in a single plugin. There is an introductory video tutorial to get you started.
After installing with CoreMelt Manager you will see the plugins in the category C2 ShotAnvil in effects. They are grouped into themes similarly to the built in plugins in Final Cut Pro.
Drag one of the ShotAnvil templates to your clip then press the open editor button.
ShotAnvil will open in a full screen editor like this
Controls and effects are detailed in video tutorials and the sections below
- Full Screen Editor User Interface
- Basic Concepts
- AI person masking
- Creating and combining Shape Masks
- Masking Tools
- Effects
- Tracking Settings
- Paint Tools
- Making your own effects
- Putting it all together
- Presets and Macros
While all the templates work in a similar way, these templates have specific details on how to get best results
- Smooth Skin Only
- Sky Replace
- Paint heal / inpaint
- Track Layer
- Screen Replace
Documentation is being updated. Please check video tutorials for further information.
Full Screen User Interface Overview
The editor lets you scrub the length of the clip and focus on using our tools on the specific shot. Lets go over the interface bit by bit.
Basic Concepts (video tutorial)
ShotAnvil lets you combine tracked paint, masks and graphics inserts with multiple layers inside a plugin. Each layer can have it's own track seperate from the others, but every effect or mask within a layer shares the same track.
If you add an effect to a layer the default is that it will apply to the entire image, unless you add a mask.
Additional Track Layers containing other components can also be created and tracked to match the motion of other parts of the source clip. Each track layer will modify the original source clip by applying its effect, limited by any masks on the track layer.
For those familiar with Apple Motion, this is similar to the way groups and hierarchies work in Motion except that in ShotANVIL, a Track Layer, and the components contained in it, can only have a single, shared tracked motion.
In terms of compositing ShotANVIL layers function like adjustment layers in After Effects, Photoshop, Motion or other graphics apps, in that it will apply the components in the Track Layer to modify the pixels in the layer below without having an explicitly duplicated source in the layer itself.
To use ShotAnvil at it's most basic, add the template ShotAnvil Blank. Drag it to a clip on the timeline, and open the ShotANVIL editor. What you have as a default is two layers: the Source Layer, which is locked by default, and an initial Track Layer.
If you add the color correct effect from the effects drop down to Track Layer, nothing will happen because the default parameters don't change the image. We can change the hue control, and it will change the whole image since there's no mask. Now if add a shape mask to Track Layer 1 you'll see the hue shift only happens within the mask.
Effects and layers are applied in order from bottom to top within a layer, in this case the mask must be below the color correct to take effect otherwise the mask will be applied after the image already has a color correct over the whole image, so it does nothing.