Compositing cg in live action

[Richard Powell]

This is really an AE question. But to be brief, you’re talking about AE’s Hue/Lightness/Saturation, Levels, Curves, Grain, Layer Modes and, most interestingly, adding light-wrap. Basically, that’s the same as what you do when you get rid of green ‘spill’ on green-screen footage, except in reverse. You see all this done expertly in the before-after shots of Lord of the Rings’ green-screen footage, but I don’t have that link.

There’s a light-wrap plugin from someone like Image Lounge, but also from Walker Effects:

https://www.walkereffects.com/support/manual/lightwrap/

And here’s a Cow Tute:

https://www.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=%3CFORUMID%3E&page=/articles/dewar_john/light_spill/index.html

[Rob Hindley]

Thanks for the advice.

Great tutorial by John Dewar. I am surprised that After Effects has no built-in compositing tools – considering it is industry-standard software for compositing.

I might have to invest in the Walker plugin or Compisite Wizard. Sigh!

Gribble
::: Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana :::

[Richard Powell]

Many third-party plugins are just quicker, focused, marketed ways to do things that you could already do with the production bundle, or even the base AE effects. For example, with matte choking, blurring and overlay modes you could probably approximate the effect of that light-wrap plug.