[Andrew Shanks]

A colleague of mine had similar issues a while back. He does a lot of timelapse photography (using digital still cameras to provide very high-rez animations), and between shots you likewise get changes in exposure. On my advice he tried colour stabilization, but as you said in your case, it seems to do more weird things than good. I know in the end he was going to look at two third party plugin solutions, one being T-Deflicker (from the Foundry’s Tinderbox 1 collection) and secondly Film Fix from Red Giant. Both are not cheap options, Tinderbox being half the price of Film Fix though. I suggest you maybe download the demos of both plugins from their websites and give them a try on your footage. If one of them works well, and you can see yourself doing similar work in the future, the investment might be worthwhile. Sorry I have no other tips.
Goodluck and let us know how you get on.

Cheers,

andrew

🙂

[Andrew Shanks]

I suggest maybe having a quick look in the tutorials on this site (Use Aharon’s tutorial on creating tight junk mattes as a good starting point
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/junk_mattes/index.html
..and another good one was an old free video tutorial from Total Training on using vector blur https://www.creativecow.net/articles/total_training/AE65/Vector_Blur/index.html I don’t do much DV keying work, but I tried that trick a couple of times and it gave a nice looking result with the edges. I also seem to remember Barend doing a bit of a review on keylight when AE first got it with a quick run through, so have a look for that). Basically the setting depend on what the shot it like, a lot of the time its mucking round with a small bit of screen strength, maybe a dash of pre-blur (being DV) and then while looking at the matte, use the clip white and clip black to get a good matte1. If you have problems with edges I suggest using proceedural matting techniques (again Barend did a tutorial on this ages back).
Maybe doing a quick search on DV keying tips and tricks on this forum (especially looking for the ones that use lumanance (green) channel tricks to get good edges (because in DV, green is the least compressed channel, …if you take your image and look at each channel individually (using the red green blue buttons on the main display) you’ll see how nasty the red and blue channels edges are (blocky) compared to the green channel.
Goodluck!!

Cheers,

andrew

[Andrew Shanks]

Okay, saw the film, …its actually a pretty simple effect (well, if you have the cash for the toys), they’ve used a motion control camera rig (indeed a big crane rig for the outside shot as they wander up to the church) and have simply done a couple of passes, one with the two main characters, then at least one other with people in period costume, ….then added some matte painting elements (as I explained above), then put a treatment over the old style extras. They may have done the crowd passes on a greenscreen stage using the same camera data on a motion control similar camera rig in order to easily isolate them for the treatment, likewise they might have had a greenscreen in situ for Tom Hanks and co to walk in front of for the initial part of that crane shot so the matte paintings could easily be inserted behind, …but having said that, I don’t think the reveals of the old archetecture ever cross their bodies, so it probably wasn’t necesary.
There you go.

[Andrew Shanks]

I’m seeing the film tomorrow, so won’t be able to comment properly until after then, but I’m guessing (if its a moving/tracking shot of them walking along the street) that it will be 3D matte paintings (or possibly 2d matte painting cards in 3d space) match-moved to the camera motion (i.e. locked to the existing buildings in shot) then some sort of organic wipe effect to bring through the matte paintings. As I say, I have no idea of the shot until I see the film, but for what you describe that is how I would do it.

cheers,

andrew

[Andrew Shanks]

I assume this is a DVD you have rights to (I don’t condone piracy, it hurts our industry), …but there are lots of time when you might need to use DVD sourced footage (I know clients sometimes come in with it as source thinking its the best format to use, ….ugh, give me a break). Anyway, there are various methods out there for doing this, on the pc if you look around you can find the old free version of DVD2AVI which can convert DVD files to avi video files (which can be imported into after effects or your editing application for use). Note you possibly will need to have ripped the files off the DVD to start with, DVD Decrypter is another freely available little application that you’ll find that does this.

Having said that, the most elegant, straightforward way of doing this that I’ve found (I was doing a showreel for a friend recently and he wanted to use the graded, letterboxed, final mixed version of a couple of short film clips, so we used the DVD of the short for this perpose as we couldn’t get a high-end tape dub), is a program called Cinematize 2.0, ….its a fairly cheap, simple little application that can convert files straight from an (unprotected) DVD (or ripped dvd files) to quicktime (and supports any quicktime codec, as well as ipod video output, so is handy if you wanna store some viewing material on your ipod for a plane/train/bus trip, or pop your showreel on your ipod in case you need to show a potential client a little teaser. The link for Cinematize is as follows and works on Mac or PC (I use the PC version).

https://www.miraizon.com/products/products.html

Cheers,

andrew

[Andrew Shanks]

I recently had to do a few shots with swarming bee’s attacking a couple of people. After trying a few things in After effects, I ended up using particle illusion to do the job, using a tiny photo of a bee for the particle shape then tweaking various settings until i got the right feel. Although i have not used Particular, you would probably get an even more convincing feel with it (being that it can work with your after effects 3d camera to give a convincing 3d perspective feel, ….my particle illusion bee’s were okay, the client was rapt, …but to me it did feel a bit 2d)

Goodluck!

andrew

[Andrew Shanks]

I recently had to do a few shots with swarming bee’s attacking a couple of people. After trying a few things in After effects, I ended up using particle illusion to do the job, using a tiny photo of a bee for the particle shape then tweaking various settings until i got the right feel. Although i have not used Particular, you would probably get an even more convincing feel with it (being that it can work with your after effects 3d camera to give a convincing 3d perspective feel, ….my particle illusion bee’s were okay, the client was rapt, …but to me it did feel a bit 2d)

Goodluck!

andrew

[Andrew Shanks]

Hey Bob,
Keylight is good and is usually my first port of call when pulling a key, but second choice is always Primatte, …as there are just some situations where Primatte seems to do a better job. Shake, as standard, has both Keylight and Primatte, …for just that reason. I am a compositor so I do a lot of keying in my day to day work, usually I will use a few different key passes (be it with the same keyer or various ones) to build a proceedural matte. If I was you I’d see how you go with Keylight, you’ll probably find it’ll work for most things you throw at it, …if the time comes that you have a problematic key that won’t pull, …download the demo of the latest version of primatte and give it a whirl, …if it works, upgrade, if it doesn’t, just work on doing a proceedural matte using keylight and the other keying tools After Effects has. Personally I have had real issues with v3 of primatte within After Effects 6.5, ..it simply doesn’t work for me, and as of yet i have had no reply from Red Giant about my issues, so I have ended up reverting to v1.6 (which works fine), …I’m in the middle of a job at the moment and so haven’t done the upgrade to AE7 (although its sitting here tempting me in its shiny new box), but I’m hoping that the newer version of primatte will work better with AE7 than it does with AE6.5.
Goodluck!!!

andrew

🙂

[Andrew Shanks]

Hi Eric,
glad to see this thread has taken some good interesting turns in regards to the averaging of track points. In regards to Syntheyes, often the best way is to do a manual track on a couple of points (as in, do a track like you would in any 2d tracking application, …correcting it when it goes astray, etc), then run the auto tracker afterwards, …by doing the manual track first you give the software a guide as to the general movement within the shot, the auto process then uses this as a start point (like rough motion vectors to look for other points doing similar things) and should be able to lock onto a few more points. Sometimes footage just might not have much in the way of defined features (like a washed out, soft, or motion blurred scene), in these cases you may have to manually set track points (all matchmove/tracking software will have issues in such circumstances). The other thing i should point out at this point is that in order to do a proper 3D matchmove, you must have parallax in your image, …i.e. your camera must be moving. If it is on a tripod you’ll get little parallax with a pan(and if nodal, you’ll get none at all), Syntheyes will give you a 2.5D solution if this is the case (tell it your camera is tripod mounted and it will lock its camera and try to work out pan and tilt info). Syntheyes is a big program that takes a bit to get your head around to use it effectively, but using it to track and animate the after effects 3D camera in order to track elements into scenes has helped me a lot in the past (plus being able to share the data with 3D colleagues in order to provide elements for my comps is great). Goodluck and let me know if you have any further questions.

Cheers,

andrew

🙂

[Andrew Shanks]

Hi Eric,
glad to see this thread has taken some good interesting turns in regards to the averaging of track points. In regards to Syntheyes, often the best way is to do a manual track on a couple of points (as in, do a track like you would in any 2d tracking application, …correcting it when it goes astray, etc), then run the auto tracker afterwards, …by doing the manual track first you give the software a guide as to the general movement within the shot, the auto process then uses this as a start point (like rough motion vectors to look for other points doing similar things) and should be able to lock onto a few more points. Sometimes footage just might not have much in the way of defined features (like a washed out, soft, or motion blurred scene), in these cases you may have to manually set track points (all matchmove/tracking software will have issues in such circumstances). The other thing i should point out at this point is that in order to do a proper 3D matchmove, you must have parallax in your image, …i.e. your camera must be moving. If it is on a tripod you’ll get little parallax with a pan(and if nodal, you’ll get none at all), Syntheyes will give you a 2.5D solution if this is the case (tell it your camera is tripod mounted and it will lock its camera and try to work out pan and tilt info). Syntheyes is a big program that takes a bit to get your head around to use it effectively, but using it to track and animate the after effects 3D camera in order to track elements into scenes has helped me a lot in the past (plus being able to share the data with 3D colleagues in order to provide elements for my comps is great). Goodluck and let me know if you have any further questions.

Cheers,

andrew

🙂