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Faux Hand held
So there’s plenty of programs and plug-ins to make dodgy, hand-held video look like smooth, steadycam stuff, but I’m looking to do the reverse: Take a tracking shot done on a dolly and turn it into a shaky, hand held shot. I’ve played in AFX using some basic ideas, including using the wiggler and shooting black marks on a white wall to use as tracking markers to replicate a walking movement, but they’ve all come out looking very much like a post effect (partially due to the fact that it’s the only non-hand held shot in the whole sequence).
Basically what’s killing me is the Parallax of the shot – the smoothness of the background against the foreground is a dead giveaway – and I’m not sure what to do about it. I’ve heard some 3D motion tracking programs can, to a certain degree, fix this, but having done no 3D work (or worked with any motion tracking outside of AFX), I’m not sure how to approach this.
Can anyone give me an idea of what is and isn’t possible and point me in the direction how it might be done?
Thanks alot
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3 Replies
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Something I did a while ago that worked pretty well was stabilise some hand held footage and then apply the data to the steady stuff … it introduced the ‘natural’ shake. Good luck with this. Roger
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Hmmmm tough call. Depends a lot on the shot and the complexity of depth. Recreating parallax that doesn’t exist is going to be near impossible. At least not in a photo-real manner. With some simpler shots you could do some roto work and start separating the different depth planes and cloning in the holes, but boy, that’s going to be a pain if you haven’t shot clean plates with this in mind. If you have middle-ground in the shot it will make it harder. Head/shoulder in forground and stuff in the distance (no close ground) could lend itself to some roto work.
Keeping the shake to a minimum will reduce the risk of blowing the illusion, especially with some motion blur. You are correct, though, move the camera too far and the lack of parallax will kill it. Any way you could reshoot? Sometimes it’s easier than days of screwing around in post, AND you get it looking 100%. Probably not what you wanted to hear.Good luck, let us know if you stumble onto something that works for you.
Alex
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Unfortunately, Rotoscoping layers and plugging the holes is not really possible. The shot is a track through a forest, so if you can imagine the complexity of trying to rotoscope every branch… oy vey.
I just ended up using the wiggler, but it got me thinking… Would such an effect be possible even if we had planned it from the beginning?
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