Footage Depth

[Shane Ross]

Well, you can blur, but it won’t really add depth. It’ll be fake, and might look fake. The only way to really do this is shoot with a camera that has a good lens that does this. You can try to layer your footage, and put an 8-point garbage matte around your subject. Then you will be in keyframe heck as you adjust every frame to make sure that the matte stays around your subject.

The bottom layer you can add the DEFOCUS plugin (built in), or if your graphics card can’t deal with that, then Gaussian Blur. Still, might look odd.

Shane

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[Colin Mcquillan]

Like Shane said, best done in camera with a good lens and a camera with 2/3’s inch chips.

However, you can achieve adequate and/or interesting stylized results with masks (multiple masks, each with a different strength of blur to add depth and distance) I would not think of doing this in FCP though. You would need to send the footage to After Effects or Motion to get acceptable results.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[David Roth weiss]

As both Shane and Colin mentioned, FCP is not the ideal tool for the job, because it really requires rotoscoping and tracking to be done properly. So, that being said, doing a convincing job using only FCP is not terribly easy. However, if you are patient, you can do a reasonable job by using the techniques both of the other guys mentioned.

See the tutorial below for a bit of help with the garbage mattes in FCP:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/basic_matte_filters.html

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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[Anthony Winson]

Thank you to everyone who comment its been very helpful info very much appreciated.

Anthony

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[Rafael Amador]

Hi Anthony,
As Shane, Coling and Dave point, a simple lineal blur or the backgroung would get very little natural.
In the reallity ceratin areas will be more out of focus than others.
You can get that with gradients.
In FC you can use any Plugin that makes “Z Defocus” “Z Blur” or similar. I have it with the Sapphire
Ae have something similar, and SHAKE too.
This woks basically making a mask with different levels of gray. In the blacks you will have full defocus, and in the white will stay in focus, with the in-between levels set by the grays.

If the camera doesn’t move, is easy to do.
If its moves, will depends.
However you do it is something very interesting to kno the technique.
Cheers,
rafael

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