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Mixing green screen footage with DV footage.
I have a project which I am using a virtual set created in 3D max. When I add the DV footage, the CG virtual set looks too sharp and “perfect”. Is there any procedures I need to do to the CG set to match the DV footage such as blur, noise or interlace?
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4 Replies
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Hey,
I know what you mean. If I were you, sincerely, I’d duplicate my DV footage. On first one, I’d lower the opacity, and on the other one, I’d play with the blending modes. This way, the quality of your DV (character, I guess?) will look like your CG background.
You could always try th effect Blur > Sharp.
If by any chances you’d have Magic Bullet, you could easily do this by applying the Buffalo Look on your DV footage.
Good luck pow!
Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional -
Sharpening your DV footage is unlikely to match the pristine look of your 3D material. Due to compression, and very often low-grade cameras etc, DV footage is full of chroma noise and digital artifacts that will just look worse when sharpened.
I think you’re closer to the mark in your own post. Experiment with a very slight gaussian blur (0.5-1 pixel) and try adding a small amount of noise as well (to the 3D stuff, not the DV footage). If the 3D material is non-interlaced, but the DV material is interlaced, you need to deinterlace the DV stuff first. Use colour balance, levels and/or curves on the both footage elements (if necessary) to match colour balance and black and white levels.
Once you’ve independently processed each layer until they’re as close as they can be, adding an overall grade (to both elements together) can be surprisingly succesful at blending two elements together. A LookSuite process, as mentioned by Justin above, or any form of grading, diffusion, noise/grain etc, added to the finished shot as a whole, will greatly assist in selling them as one shot.
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You can also try the match grain effect, which was designed for this sort of thing. You apply it to the 3D virtual set layer and sample the noise from the DV clip, then tweak.
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As Steve says, Match Grain is a great help in matching the grain and ‘texture’ between video footage and CG images.
And if you’re using the CG as a background, you may want to add a lens blur effect to defocus the backgrounds a bit. Depending on the scene this may be more realistic, and it removes the unnatural sharpness of CG. Make sure you apply Match Grain as your last effect though, otherwise you’re blurring the grain again.
Bar3nd
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