Barend Onneweer
Forum Replies Created
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Not sure about Mocha AE, but in Mocha (the full version) you can draw and animate a garbage matte around areas that the tracker needs to ignore. In your case the person walking in front of the screen. That would help Mocha get a better track.
But now that you’ve got a decent manual track I’m not sure what the problem is.
Placing your video on top of the corner-pin animated background and keying out the blue in the top layer should get you what you want. So what exactly is going wrong there?
Bar3nd
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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Which I guess shows how complicated this stuff is.
Thus far Ron and Kathlyn have gone for a very non-elitist approach. Everyone is welcome here, from absolute n00bs 😉 to seasoned pros and Bob Zelin.
Some people may prefer the clean and focussed (or pretentious?) attitude of other places, but this is the COW. With it’s own quirky mechanisms both from a technical and social pov.
And it works 🙂
Bar3nd
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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Hi Clyde,
Thanks for the kind words. Yes the 3D elements are all Cinema 4D – using the Advanced Renderer module.
There is no 3D camera tracker in Cinema 4D. If you want to get into 3D camera tracking there are many tools available. I’ve had best luck with Boujou – but many are very positive about Syntheyes which is by far the most affordable commercial option out there.
But for a start you could check out the free (for non-commercial projects) Voodoo tracker
https://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/docs/manual.htmlHope this helps.
Barend
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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[Jack Leto] “If you want believability get Maya.”
Could you expand on what you mean by that? I’ve seen a lot of photoreal work done in Cinema 4D. For feature film and commercials. The Advanced Renderer is actually pretty good and reasonably fast.
Maya Live is crap – which I assume is one of the reasons Autodesk bought Realviz. And Maya Live only comes with Maya Unlimited which at 5k is hardly a feasible pricepoint for someone wanting to get his feet wet in 3D.
Bar3nd
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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Well, it doesn’t make any sense to comment about Maya if you don’t know what it does.
Personally – after a lot of deliberation I chose Cinema 4D. I came from a 3DSMax background, and tried Maya before finally ending up with C4D.
Cinema 4D is easier to get into than Maya. It’s also more affordable than Maya. I’m very happy with the Advanced Renderer module – I get excellent quality output.
Maya IS more high-end in the sense that it allows for tweaking an customizing on an insane level. The amount of parameters available and flexibility offered is extreme. The power of the scripting language is equally impressive. And if you look at the Unlimited package: the fur and fluid tools are way out there. But also the shader tree and animation tools offer more subtle control than C4D
So for bigger studios and 3D specialists it may offer benefits to go with a tool like Maya.
For smaller companies and allround professionals I’d advise going with Cinema 4D. You’ll be up to speed making money quicker with C4D than with Maya.
Note that I’m not saying you can’t do excellent work in C4D – otherwise I wouldn’t have chosen it.
Barend
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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The shrink/grow parameters won’t do any good. You can get super-tight edges using it, (usually right where you don’t want the edges to be tight), but it also cuts corners and removes any detail – right under the armpits for instance.
I’m guessing the problem is caused by the DV compression – since those sharp details suffer a lot from the compression. If you have Magic Bullet of Key Correct Pro (both sets are Red Giant Software) you could use the deartifactor that comes with those.
If not, try this:
Drag your source footage into a clean comp (call it Deartifact)
Duplicate it.
Apply a 4 pixel Median filter to the top layer.
Set top layer blend mode to ‘color’.The difference is very subtle, but you’ve essentially smoothed out the color pixellation caused by the DV compression.
Now drag this comp into a new comp and apply your keying.
If that doesn’t help, you’re probably best off animating a small mask to get rid of those areas.
Barend
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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No no no,
Although you don’t want to underexpose your greenscreen (no too much anyway) – overexposing the greenscreen will cause more green light to bounce around causing spill.
So if there’s white in your foreground elements you want to make sure you put enough light on it to ‘blow out’ the green spill.
Bar3nd
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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It’s not so much the issue of the relative brightness. You can key out dark areas just as well as bright areas.
What I meant to say is: if you don’t light the subject with enough light, the green cast caused by the greenscreen is going to spill all over the white shirt – causing it to come out green in the image.
Hope that makes more sense now.
Bar3nd
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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Hi Brian,
If you want to track elements to the head it’s going to help to have multiple markers. But it all depends on what exactly you’ll be compositing in. If you just need to lock the position of the animated element to the ‘head’ then you’d be fine tracking just a single marker (as long as it’s always visible).
If you plan on tracking scale and rotation too, it gets a little more complicated and you’ll need multiple markers on the head.
To minimize green spill on white clothing you’d typically want to stay as far away from the greenscreen background as possible. And the lighting needs to be right. Usually I’ll light the subject with some magenta gels and color correct the slight red cast out in post. But the slightly red-ish lighting will help reduce green spill on the subject. And definitely don’t underexpose the subject. You want the whites to be significantly brighter than the green background – which will help separate them when you’re keying. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘black taping the inside of the shirt’.
If the camera is locked on a tripod you won’t need tracking markers on the greenscreen and you’ll be happier leaving them off since you’ll need to garbage mask them all out.
Good luck,
Barend
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects