Blaise Douros
Forum Replies Created
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No. That’s a custom-built rig for each camera, since they’re all different sizes. The only non-custom way would be to do it with a motorized gimbal like a Movi, and control the roll axis.
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Does this plugin still work? I LOVED SureTarget, but one of the CC releases broke it, so unless there’s been an update…
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In the example you gave, they definitely used a real light–they used ForceFX sabers on-set for that exact reason, to create realistic interactions with the wielder.
How you do it in post will depend on how much time you want to spend on it. You could probably build a series of masks to simulate facial contours, etc., but I think that’s impractical.
What I would do is create a secondary adjustment layer over your actor, post-key, that duplicates and greatly softens whatever Glow effect you’re using for the outer edge of the blade. Then, I’d set it to a blending mode like Color, or maybe Screen, and then make sure that it’s using your green screen matte so that it doesn’t affect ANYTHING on the background. The trick here is that it needs to be set wide enough that it illuminates the actor’s face beyond the edge point of the visible lightsaber glow. The idea is that (a) it uses the matte so it’s only visible on the actor’s face and (b) it starts showing on their face well before the edge of the lightsaber comes anywhere near–so the closer it gets, the more intense the light is.
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In that case, I think you need a multi-layered approach. I don’t think there’s a way to make the background scene react to the corner pins of the comped image–not without it just resizing to the same size as the existing corner pins. You sure you don’t want to just let the image fly off the tablet to fill the screen? No? Okay, here’s what I’d try:
You need to do a two-stage corner pinning transformation. Stage one: track the corners of your tablet, and corner pin your comped image onto the tablet as usual. Precompose this with the background layer.
Now, in the new comp, apply the corner pin effect to the pre-comp–this will now affect your whole image. Pull the corner pins wayyyy outside the frame until you’ve framed up the tablet so it’s full screen. Now crossfade to the image on the tablet screen.
In order to not lose resolution on the tablet screen, you will need to work at a much higher resolution in your pre-comps. No matter what, you are going to have some quality loss on the background image as you zoom in–but that will happen no matter what, with any approach to zooming in on the image in post.
With some better planning, you could have done this on set, with the camera physically zooming into the tablet–then, all you’d have needed to do was the one corner pinning pass, or even better, using Mocha to do a planar track.
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If your DVD player is taking in an HDMI signal, then you can get any HDMI-capable camera, and the result will be the same; DVDs are encoded with a uniform mpeg2 codec.
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Why not just pre-compose both layers, and apply the corner pin to the pre-comp?
Reading your other post – Or are you trying to “zoom in” to the tablet image, and get the background image to react to the corner pins of the comped image extending out to the full screen?
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No photo attached–you’ll be stuck with cloning out the halos in Photoshop.
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Ask the client if they have a plan for how they’re going to play it back. Frankly, as a video producer, I’d tell a client that building the delivery platform is out of my wheelhouse–I’m happy to produce the video component based on their specs, but unless you’re an HTML guy, I wouldn’t touch trying to build it.
Presumably, if they want this kind of content, they have a plan for delivery, so I would check with them before chasing your tail on figuring out the platform, and focus on delivering the content for them first.
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You’re just going to have to play with it until it looks right. For that verité feel, I would add a slight blur synced to the zoom that resolves a few moments after the zoom finishes, to simulate a zoom-and-refocus from the camera op.
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I use the Canon 24-105 on the FS7 with a speedbooster. I rarely use other lenses, aside from a 100mm macro lens. There are sharper lenses out there, but for what I do, it’s a perfect all-around lens that’s good for almost every shooting situation.