I'm doing another lightsaber movie and I just realized something that makes me pretty sad.
My workflow is such that I edit, then export reference footage, animate the lightsabers, and then render out the lightsabers and clashes by themselves that way I do not lose more quality in the original footage and I have more flexibility. However, I realized that the images I'm seeing in the compositor aren't quite the same as what comes out of the VSE when I set the clip to the Add blend mode:
This makes it so I can see how it should look with the footage and render out the lightsaber layer before it's added to the footage:
So then I take the rendered out lightsaber layer and add it back in the VSE:
But much to my dismay, rendering out stills from the compositor and VSE look very different (I personally prefer the compositor's look).
With the Compositor:
With the VSE:
To see the difference easier, right click to view in a new tab and then tab between the two (I didn't want to loose any more image quality by using a .gif).
So what is the difference between these two addition functions and how can I make it so the VSE add blend mode has the same result as the compositor? Clamping the add nodes and turning off the adjustment layer does not influence this effect.
Thanks!
UPDATE: Rendering to .exr surprisingly does not fix the issue. Further testing also shows that the issue is most likely in the adding method.