I was wondering if anyone is having the same problem. I save my EXRs without the alpha channel, and yet when I open them in CS3 Extended, it automatically knocks out the background, as if I saved the alpha channel. It does the same thing in AE. It opens correctly in CS3 regular however.
I did upgrade my photoshop, and it at least gets the alpha correct now, but it shouldn’t be knocking it out if I didn’t save it…
You may know this already. The alpha can be set to be ignored in AE. Right click on the footage in the project window and choose Interpret Footage…
One thing about 32bit images and AE to remember is that a lot of the filters will cause the footage to clamp. AE will give a little yellow triangle warning sign next to the effect. I’m not pro enough to know all the consequences of this but I try and avoid it none the less.
It’s also important to set up AE in Linear Workspace in the project settings…
decent article on this on fxguide.com
http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name=fxtips&rop=showcontent&id=315
My AE skills are fairly remedial because we don’t do much animation, but I’ll keep that in mind.
Now if photoshop had an option to ignore the alpha channel in an EXR, or rather, to keep an alpha channel rather than knocking it out…
For Photoshop, if you replace the OpenEXR plugin file that comes with CS3with an older version (CS2 or CS) you’ll get the familar functionality back.
it’s indeed annoying. I have a similar problem with png’s in photoshop. When saved with alpha, it doesn’t have an alpha channel but the actual background is deleted from the image. So you can’t get the BG back by disabling the alpha channel. In a simple viewer you can see that the background is there, only in PS you cannot see it.
It seems there are two (at least) CS2 OpenEXR.8bi files (maybe from upgraded version?)… One which fixes the problem, and one which doesn’t.
Anyway, I have the one that works now, and it solved that problem. Thanks all.