Cryptomatte drawbacks

[kosso_olli]

Hi,
we are evaluating to switch to Cryptomatte for our high-res print work in Photoshop. Does Cryptomatte have any drawbacks over the MMRE workflow? The only issue I found so far is that is not possible to generate masks for multisub-materials, but I think this could be fixed. Any issues besides that? Speed, artifacts, etc?

[kosso_olli]

Is anybody using Cryptomatte and can share some insights?

[Morbid Angel]

Cryptomatte is not the best when used in photoshop. Its original design was for vfx, use in nuke and such software which can easily and in realtime split out and update/maintain aovs such as cryptomatte. The photoshop plugin implementation is much worse, it just dumps all the cryptomatte into photoshop layers. So if you have 50-100 objects for each object it will create a layer. If you wish to update that later, its a redo process no dynamic updating. With that said, cryptomatte in the vfx is a heaven sent tool. It neutralizes the old MME approach. We pretty much stopped using multi-matte setups, with some rare exceptions.

[fixeighted]

Yeah, avoid P'shop and only use with something more capable, as Morbid said. You can always port it to Photoshop at some point if necessary in the pipeline.
Main drawback is transparency I would say, though iirc that may be being looked at for a future release - can't think of any other reason not to use them (there are workarounds for transparency if needed).
A cryptomatte will give a pixel perfect mask which MM will not, so for me it's a no-brainer.

[glorybound]

I had so many corrupt files while using Photoshop, I stopped using it. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

[kosso_olli]

Okay, thanks for the info. Maybe we'll stick with MMRE for Photoshop.

[RobH22]

Deleted by User

[fixeighted]

MMRE is just Multimatte element, so based on g-buffer ID. Each object has an id and the multimatte renders rgb based on that, so e.g. 3 objects, ID 1/2/3 output in the matte as 1=r 2=g 3=b.
Cryptomatte does it differently, outputting a random colour for every object in the scene, without user input.
If you have After Effects or similar then you can easily select any object perfectly for masking.

[glorybound]

PSD Manager will be your best friend.