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Advice for upcoming project (Blue Screen Shooting)
Hello all!
I’m wondering if anyone can lend some knowledge and advice. I have a 30 second commercial coming up that is going to involve motion tracking, chroma keying, and animation in after effects 3D. The concept of the commercial takes you though 5 different shots that are all inter-connected. (like one shot seamlessly leads you to another
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9 Replies
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I sounds like a very complex series of shot for your first time. I would advise a quick and dirty proof of concept so you don’t get hung up on the thousands of pitfalls that will no doubt pop up. Most film studios will run through their process so they aren’t filming it “cold”.
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You might want to start looking at this great tutorial drom Digital Juice.
Or here: https://generalspecialist.com/ Search or Hold down CTRL+F and type “Greenscreen and Bluescreen Checklist” then read this fantastic article 🙂 Thx to sam.mltn for the link.
Hope that helped!
Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional -
I agree, test, test , test first. Now for some quick notes:
You haven’t described your camera motion. Is it nodal? Does it orbit? Is it a long lens thing or wide lens thing? What you are doing with the camera can change everything. If you don’t see the sides of your content, then you can just lock the camera, shoot the elements, then simply stick them in 3D space and set their layer to always face the AE cam. That way it will seem like they fit in the 3D world. But this has it’s limits.
If you are doing a medium to lens lens thing where the cam is on head of some sort, you can probably get away with AE’s 2D tracking.
If you are moving the camera in 3 dimensions and you see from all sides of your content or you are trying to stick 3D elements in the FG and still match your content, you should get a 3D track. I recently bought SynthEyes and did a few very succseful 3D tracks with it and it works great.
If you DO go with a 3D track, make sure you have tracking markers on your BG, but also in grid like arrays on the floor near where your subject will be. The closer to the subject you define the X, Y, and Z planes, the more accurate the 3D solve is.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Oh, and HD question. Since you are doing this for eventual output in NTSC, then I would shoot to HD Cam at 29.97 PsF. That way you have a frame per frame with no pulldown hassle to deal with and no interlacing.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
If you want to learn more about 3D tracking, you can also search Amazon for Matchmoving by Tim Dobbert.
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I think we’re going to try and keep the camera moves more linear. (just simple moves in and across the subjects) The producer did want to do some shots that would push in towards the subject, and then the jib would come up over top of the subject with the camera looking down. We may try this for an experiment. But making sure to get plenty for simpler shots incase they don
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I suggest the cheap but brilliant “Syntheyes”. 3D trackers don’t need manual tracking (unless you decide to). But they do need as many cues on the walls and floor as possible for a realiable solution. A 3D tracker usually does several hundreds tracks on it’s own in a scene and decides (with a little guidance from the user) what the lens was and where it was at any given time. Once you have a good track and set the scaling right you export that data as camera info to a lot of standard programs.
If you can get away with not putting the camera over the talent or to the side of the talent, then you don’t need to track at all. Just key them and stick them in the AE world with their layer set to auto-orient to camera. That’s what most motion graphics houses have been doing lately. Especially music videos that are graphics oriented.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Adam,
Peep this:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/868236?
Watch the video link in the first post. Then read the little Q&A after that I did with him. It explains a little how they did it. It shows great examples of footage shot that was used in AE without being tracked.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Thanks so much for your help Chris! Much appreciated!
I’ll try to absorb some of this.
Adam
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