I finished the animation on this scene this morning. In all there are 17 separate layers that needed animation. This shot doesn’t show the shadows which is the final thing I animated. Exporting this scene with a green screen proved problematic. If I used a green screen the masks would become partially transparent. I then tried a blue screen but then the masks turned blue and the policeman became partially transparent. I also tried pink and purple thinking any other color might work, but those changed the skin tomes to a sickly green.
Callipeg has an option to export with a HEVC with Alpha setting but After Effects doesn’t recognize the file. Pam finally came up with an option I had not considered which was to export using GIF. I assumed that file would not have a high enough resolution but it seemed to work fine.
This scene is 28 frames long. That is just short of one second. For some reason the GIF file was just short of 28 frames when I imported it into After Effects. It seemed to be just a frustrating 3 frames shorter than needed. I exported the composite into the final Premiere Pro file anyway and had to slow the animation down to 80% to fill the slot allotted in the film. When animating I put a lot of thought into how fast or slow things should move so it is frustrating to have to slow down a fast paced run just because of a technical glitch in how files are transferred.
Back in After Effects I found a time remapping feature which just hold the last frame for the duration. That is what I used to get the GIF to play at the right speed. Since the shot ends with a fast paced zoom cut the held frames will not be noticed. I will have to keep this in mind for future animations on this film in that a slight hold at the beginning and end of the scene should give me some wiggle room for this strange GIF timing fiasco.