Under Construction

 Some time ago, I decided to make a modern version of those infamous "under construction" pages - complete with spinning skull animation. As I did say "modern", the animation is VP9 WebM with alpha channel. For this, I needed to first download and install WebM from Fnordware. 

I thought "for sure, AI can already remove the background, no sweat!". I already had a spinning skull on a black background; I just needed the subject isolated and the background made transparent.

So, after trying a few services that wanted me to sign up for a subscription, I found Unscreen, where it's possible to work on a pay-as-you-go basis. I uploaded my clip, looked at the preview, where everything seemed fine - and forked over my €3.33. However, what came back was a noisy matte with a lot of bleeding. So, I initiated a refund under their 14 day money back guarantee, which, to their credit, they honored, and went to work isolating the skull myself.

A great help was the "Magic Wand" preset from Mikey's Effects. Maybe you know the Magic Wand tool from Photoshop - this preset brings that to After Effects. This video will explain:

So, after using this preset, and somewhat haphazardly animating a matte for fine-tuning, I got the end result you can see on the live page.

In conclusion, AI has great potential for this kind of simply definable routine editing work, but it's not there yet.