FCP Time Lapse with real time overlay

[Mark Suszko]

Can you be more specific?

[Mike Sumner]

Of course. I want to shoot a wide shot of a restaurant, where we see diners in fast motion; I’d like the waiters to be in slow motion.
If I shoot on a locked off camera, is there a way in FCP of combining the two images?

Thanks again
Mike

[Walter Soyka]

[Mike Sumner] “I want to shoot a wide shot of a restaurant, where we see diners in fast motion; I’d like the waiters to be in slow motion. If I shoot on a locked off camera, is there a way in FCP of combining the two images?”

To do this from the same shot will require a lot of planning, test, and rotoscoping. FCP does not have a good roto toolkit.

I’d want a good VFX supervisor on the shoot.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Mike Sumner]

Thanks Walter,

Sounds like an after effects job.

Appreciate you taking the trouble to respond.

Mike

[Walter Soyka]

[Mike Sumner] “Sounds like an after effects job.”

It could be AE, or Nuke, or your compositor of choice… but the shoot is critically important to pulling off the shot.

If this were me, off the top of my head I’d want to shoot each element separately, possibly over greenscreen, then composite them back together. Taking elements from the same footage at different speeds means that not only must you roto out the waiters for the fast shot, you must also roto and clone out the waiters for the slo-mo version. You’ll also have to deal with food appearing/disappearing from the tables at both speeds, because these elements will seem to cross time.

It’s deceptively complicated shot. Maybe there’s some way to keep the concept but simplify the execution?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Mark Suszko]

I would do this test:

Shoot with the camera locked off, no movement of the camera. Roll your time lapse, or just shoot regular footage for an hour and add the speed-up and blurs in post.

Shoot another pass of just the waiters or other people that need to be in normal time, no other crowds.

Stack the two shots on the time line and adjust the blending mode and possibly the opacity of the top layer. No roto work there. Also try an identical setup but make one layer for each normal-time character and crop them with a soft wipe in final cut’s motion tab. It *might* be just that simple; worth a short test to find out.

[Mike Sumner]

Thanks Mark, I’ll give this a try too.

M