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onsite compositing set up
Hey Gang,
Quick question. Can someone point me in the right direction in regards to the proper workflow and set up for a onsite composite to test angles & such.
We have a shoot coming up in January using a SDX-900 camera and I want run a feed into our laptop to AE to check comps. Whats the best workflow? Capture to Premiere,encode to uncompressed AVI, comp in AE? or is there a more efficient way. Any direction would be greatly appreciated.
Trying to be betterThanks in advance
pearl
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4 Replies
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Hey Pearl,
heres the way i work, I use a feed from the camera (going via firewire, …and converter if its an analogue feed) directly into After Effects using the great little plugin “Lensfeed”
https://www.frischluft.com/lensfeed/introduction.phpI suggest downloading the demo and having a play to deside whether it will work for you (if its not for you, scroll past this blurb to my next comment). Basically lensfeed is a filter, so you make a new solid in a composition (of relevent resolution), apply the filter, then it will select the first video source it comes across (if you have multiple video sources you can select which one, ….indeed by using instances of the filter on 5 layers you can have in theory have 5 live feeds in your composition. Feeds show up just like a normal after effects layer, ….except they keep updating. This means you can apply any after effects filter or transform you like to it (as if it was a normal source layer). Its not a realtime feed (i.e. don’t expect 25 or 30fps, more like a couple of frames a second), but its enough to setup lights and check things such as eyelines, etc. I usually apply keylight, do a rough one click key, then display the matte, …even on a good key this will show up weak areas for the gaffer to fix, ….once thats done you can do a quick tweak of the keylight settings to see that it will key okay.
When you can’t get a feed, or the feed is of poor quality due to the nature of the firewire source, the standard practice is to take a digital still (at aprox resolution, …i.e. 2k for film or HD, less for broadcast, …approximate other camera settings too if you can, …and save using fine jpeg, ….don’t go raw, as that will give you too crip a result, you want a bit of grunge in there just for safety to keep you on your toes) of the set. I usually get the DP to take the camera and take a shot from below or in front of the camera lense prior to first take on a new setup (then I rush away, copy to my laptop and do a test key in After Effects to make sure we’ll have no problems in post).
You can of course capture your footage using a non-linear system too (and even do the rough keying in there as you wish. So yeah, many ways to do the job. But I definitely recommend using the matte view (black and white alpha) to show the DP and Gaffer when setting up a greenscreen shoot, …they love being able to see where possible problems could lurk.
Goodluck!!
Andrew
🙂
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WOW! This is why I Love the COW! Thanks for the insight I’ll check things out and get together with my crew and see what we can come up with.
Really appreciate your time, you could have just pointed out the link but the explanation is the icing.Thanks
pearl
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I see this program is only available for windows platform. Do you know of a mac program that does the same thing?
-A.N.
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Frischluft generally provide plugins for both platforms, so I’d be inclined to email them and ask if a Mac version is on the way (it might be that they’ve only got the PC version ready at this point, I’d hope that they’l be providing an OSX version of it, …its a very new plugin).
As for other options, I haven’t heard of any other plugin that can do quite the same thing for AE, …but some stop-motion and claymation software can allow you to do live chroma keys using DV camera input, so maybe have a look around those (there are Mac and PC apps around, but i couldn’t give you much info about the Mac based ones).
Sorry I can’t be of more help.Goodluck!
Andrew
🙂
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