Alexxx
Forum Replies Created
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Hi there,
Keying animals in motion can get expensive real quick. I have seen greenscreen footage of horses on specifically designed treadmills so the camera, greenscreen and horse do not move from their spot. Then I have also seen a project where a screen-truck drove along side a horse whilst a camera-truck was on the other side. This looked like it was quite difficult to light, and probably needed to be cleaned up a bit in post. It was done because other elements were interacting with the galloping horse so a treadmill could not be used.
If you have no budget for anything like this you may have to resort to hand keying which is never a pleasant task. Possibly parts of the key could be made repeatable with a looping matte assuming the horse doesn’t mix things up too much.
There may be other tricks to get animal keys, but the three above are the main ones I have come across.
Good luck
Alex
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My money is on it being majority actual footage that was shot. Then masks, smear effects and a lot of painstaking compositing.
Alex
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Hi Josef,
Right-click on the 3D layer you want to behave this way, choose TRANSFORM, then AUTO-ORIENT. Here you can select “Orient towards camera”.
Alex
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Hi,
DV handles colour sampling of green better than blue due to how the codec operates. So there is slightly more information in the green channel as opposed to the blue. I have however seen people get good keys out of blue…well, as good as you can get from DV.
In general it just seems green is more workable when it comes to a lot of “human” talent as green is usually absent. Blue is a little more common in clothing (try keying jeans with bad lighting). Keeping this in mind you can of course still make use of the blue space.
Best thing I suggest is to do a test key on both with the camera and see. What may take you a couple of hours may save you days in the end. It may even reveal some lighting problems you would later encounter etc.
Alex
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Thanks for that. It’s helping me heaps. Only thing I’m now stuck on is getting the TRUE position of a layer that is parented to a null. The .position reference doesn’t seem to pull the absolute position of a layer after it’s parenting. Is there a way to get this. You see, all these nodes are also being rotated inside a NULL so all the positions are relative to the NULL at the top of the stack.
Great tutorial, though!
Cheers
Alex
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Thanks for that. It’s helping me heaps. Only thing I’m now stuck on is getting the TRUE position of a layer that is parented to a null. The .position reference doesn’t seem to pull the absolute position of a layer after it’s parenting. Is there a way to get this. You see, all these nodes are also being rotated inside a NULL so all the positions are relative to the NULL at the top of the stack.
Great tutorial, though!
Cheers
Alex
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I would consider grabbing the frame where he’s just about to get up and bringing this into photoshop. Clone out the car and re-create the nature strip as best as you can. Now bring the whole top section back into the original footage and use the bluring to your advantage. I would add maybe another 1-2pixel blur to the whole background and slowly blend around the half way mark where the background become foreground. Difficult to explain but the idea is the whole background is retouched, not just the part where the car was. This means you won’t have a small patch of unmatched footage as the whole top section is basically a still. Use the depth of field to aid you in bluring the line where the background reconnects to the live-action foreground. Now add/match grain to the new background to match it to the live-action forground. Roto out the actor and cross your fingers.
There is really no hard and fast rule that will result in a perfect result. Without seeing full-res footage it’s difficult to say what will be the best way but all the above suggestions are worth a try depending on how much time you have.
Either way I would use the stylistic bluring you already make use of to your advantage to cover up the paint-out and reblending of the footage. This would be way harder if you’re trying to kill an infocus foreground object 😉
Good luck – look forward to seeing what you end up with.
Alex
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LCD TVs are comparable to Plasmas in regards to depths. They can be wall mounted, placed on stands etc. They don’t have the burn in problem that plasmas can experience if this is a real concern. If your footage is already 4:3 then you may just have to use the widezoom function or simply live with the horizontal cropping…as you said, it looks good on your home display. Some things are not suited for LCD display due to how the technology functions and people’s perception of the colour range LCD’s have (or haven’t) got.
Best thing would be to try a few out. Take the footage to a dealer and make them play it on a bunch of displays. We had to do that for a certain job simply because the production consisted of a lot of black and for the LCDs they were using couldn’t show this as black as the plasmas. So in that case we went for plasmas, in other cases we have gone with LCD.
Best of luck.
Alex
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Hi Jeffrey,
With digital signage we’ve only come across burn in on older plasmas and where there was static footage in frame for the whole time. Unless you have a logo that sits in the same spot you shouldn’t have a problem. Also check out LCD screens which are quite good – not sure of cost where you are. More recently we have created signage using DLP projectors and special screens that allow rear projection and really give off a good image even in well lit areas. Nice for shops and larger areas where you can hide the projector behing the screen, in a waiting room it may not work – depends on space.
But to be honest, plasmas are still being used heavily for instore digital signage and as long as you keep things moving, you should be ok. Double check your resolution so it looks nice on the plasmas, you don’t want your 4:3 footage stretched to 16:9 – and boxing it in on a widescreen plasma doesn’t look too nice with the black bars either side.
Good luck.
Alex
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Hi Markus,
In the field of corporate production we find that it is indeed getting a little more diverse. Clients certainly can get a taste of this new “digital bling” which can get tossed around a lot. However, it still strongly depends on the message and intended audience. A lot of financial reports/stockholder presentations etc still tend to be quite conservative and effects are subtle. You also have the “CEO addresses” where it’s mostly interview style. Often they do not want to be overshadowed with effects and it’s mostly a straight-shooting interview.
Having said all that, there is a new breed of corporate video which uses what the advertising world has used for years to influence their audience. Visually stimulating productions which entertain can sometimes make boring subject matter quite appealing. Internal product launches, team presentations/findings, training videos and even corporate digital signage is really embracing digital design aesthetics rather than a plain old text messages and some photos moving about. So yes, there is definitely a need for more design in corporate video. It’s not dissimilar to print – you have your plain word documents ring bound together with maybe a couple of colour headings and a front page photo – and then you have your professionally bound full colour gloss prints with beautiful typography and image treatments. Not always necessary, but it can certainly help make the right impression when it needs to count.
You may find the majority of corporate work you engage is interview based with some titles etc. in which case you probably don’t need to invest months in learning how to create effects. Learn some basic design concepts, invest in some good fonts and maybe typography books and you’ll be surprised how far that can stretch before you need to touch a single effects plugin. Out of all industries I think good, clean design and use of colour is still very much appreciated by the corporate world – I’m sure even Nike don’t have vector skater punks morphing into 3D flowers which then burst into the text of their annual report everytime they present. Then again…it is Nike 😉
Good luck.
Alex