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rotation question
Hi there,
I’m editing a commercial and have an issue with a certain shot that needs to be rotated.
In the scene a guy flips, and the frame flips upside down with him. Unfortunately the camera does not flip itself, so I need to do it in post.
I’ve tried flipping in Final Cut, but unless I crop in by about 60% you can see the edges of the frame.
Is there another way to flip this without distorting the image and keeping the frame the same?
I also know after effects. Would this be an AE challenge?
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7 Replies
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My first thought is to add a background while the frame flips, to make it less noticeable. Also, make the flip as fast as feasibly possible.
Just I thought.
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The problem is that it was shot in a kitchen so there will be cupboards bordering the frame.
Maybe I can composite mode it over something a similar color so the blend can hide the corners?
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Yeah, or maybe do something similar to that fake widescreen look, where the black pillar boxes of a 4:3 image are filled with a scaled up and blurred layer of the same image to fill a 16:9 frame. Along with some other creative effects, besides just key framing rotation, you might be able to pull off a pretty good look.
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The more complete fix would be to ‘fill in the blanks’, and make a much bigger original scene so that you can rotate the frame. If its a static architectural background, this might not be as challenging as it sounds.
jPo“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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Hi Joseph,
Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by ‘Fill in the blanks’?
I think the shot is a Mid and not a wide so there’s not a lot of room for cropping.
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To clarify, you just want the guy himself to flip, within a wider scene? He actually performs the flip action himself? Or is he more or less static in position and you mean to flip the entire image of him?
If you mean you need to cut him out of the shot and flip just him, there are a couple ways to do that in post, though it would have been easier to shoot the guy against a green screen for this. But what’s done is done…
You can roto-mask the guy right on the final cut timeline, using one of Paul Crisp’s awesome free plug-in improvements to the multipoint masking tool. It comes in 4,6,8,12,16, and 32-point versions, allowing exceptional key-frame control of the mask. You would duplicate your video track, freeze the lower version, then apply the mask tool to the upper version. Once masked, you can rotate the guy as you like. To really make this look good, the background has to be a version without the guy in it, so you might have to do some photoshopping on a still of the shot just before the flip, to put back the details obscured by his body. Best situation, you have a shot of the room without him in it, thus avoiding the photoshop work.
The new version of AfterEffects would be very helpful to solve this problem, with the roto-masking tool.
If all you have is photoshop, you could also do your roto-masking in that, by importing the video as an image sequence in targa or tif format, 32-bit, preserving alpha. Erase around the guy’s shape in each frame with the help of the “extract” filter option. For something like a flip in real-time, you’d only be working on maybe 60 frames or so, not too tedious. Re-import the altered frames into their own bin, with the duration per still set at one frame, now you can drop that into a track on the video timeline and it should work.
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Basically the guy flips in real life in the kitchen, and the camera stays still. In post we flip the frame whilst the guy is mid air so when he lands the kitchen is upside down.
Thank you for your great advice, I’ve passed it onto my producer. I’m just an editor so today they’ve decided to hire a post guy to work on the rotoscopping since its quite complicated . It’s good to know how to do it though, so thank you for your thorough answer!
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