Glint filter isn't rendering

By render, do you mean Export? ProRes 4444? If so, what do you get if you overlay the video on another background? Do you see the glow effect then?

Motion renders (exports) glow effects (with transparency) in much finer resolution and more subtly than expected. If you want the full glow effect, then don't use transparency (ProRes 422HQ and you can apply the non-transparent clip with a Screen or Add blend mode if you need to re-create transparency). [Make sense?]

I expect it's because Glint is quite new and it is the best glow filter to use with the new 3D text feature. The rendering of it with no "environment" (background, etc.) is more realistic than the others*. That said, Glint still flattens (rasterizes) like (most of) the other glow filters, but if you apply it to the parent group of 3D text objects, it maintains the 3D-ness of the text objects without the apparent flattening. (There are three other filters that will work in a similar fashion: Overdrive, Outer Glow and Light Rays -- although Light Rays degrades somewhat and so is "marginal"). All the others, even applied at the group level, will reduce grouped 3D objects to "layer order" so that layers on top will always be "in front" of all other objects.

*Would we be able to see a glint in space - in a vacuum - with no atmospheric medium to refract through? That's what I figure rendering in ProRes 4444 is like - no atmosphere - pure transparency. [Just a guess... no actual facts to base that on.]

Hi!

Glint looks to have trouble rendering alpha layer on a transparent background. The "in motion preview" looks good but you get a different result when exporting to video with transparency or image with transparency.

If you draw a white shape and apply glint and have a look at the RGB view and compare it to the alpha view then you can see the problem. There seems to be no premultiplying going on.

fig1. White oval on a black background.

fig2. Same white oval with glint applied.

fig3. The alpha view of the same scene.

In my logic the alpha has way to low intensity.

I'm making a transparent overlay ad for a tv channel and want to use the glint effect for creating a sunny light effect. It displays beautiful in Motion but rendering a transparent image sequence destroys the transparency of glint. The glint effect is almost non existent. Workaround was to put a glow effect between the object and the glint. This makes the alpha pipeline work but changes the outcome slightly. Perhaps this is an issue with premultiplying? However the premultiplying option in png export seems to be missing now in the new version of Motion.

Any thoughts?

Experiments seem to show that Motion is adjusting (correcting) Exposure upon output (when alpha is involved). There doesn't seem to be any way to control this. The brightness applied with the glint filter seems to be scaled back to something akin to broadcast safe and at the same time reducing the effectiveness of the effect. Also, this only seems to happen when the background is set to Transparent in Project Properties. When I change the Background property to Environment, the exported glint (re-imported) looks exactly like the original (against the same background). When imported into FCPX, this is not ideal because you need the luma keyer to take out the background and you end up with greyscale "edges". The other option is to apply the media with the Add Blend mode which is perfect for *just the objects" with the glint effect, but if the media contains any other subjects, they will be blended with whatever other background you have in use. This technique (Environment BG + Add blend in FCPX) should work for your overlay.

One other solution is to create a new Effect in Motion; Apply the Glint filter to the Effect Source and publish all the parameters for the Glint filter and apply the effect in FCPX. (It works very well). You can set up what you need for any particular project by setting the parameters to your project settings (these will become the default values in FCPX).

HTH