Blaise Douros
Forum Replies Created
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This was done on a turntable. If you watch where the specular highlights fall on the edges of the bike’s tubes, the lights stay put while the bike rotates.
My company actually owns a motorized turntable that I can shoot this stuff on, but you could build a DIY, handcranked rig super easily. A bicycle drivetrain would actually give you a lot of flexibility, since you could control your rotation speed by changing gears!
While it is possible to do it as a series of stills, I frankly like to just take video and do speed ramps in post. A slow enough rotation, plus shooting at 60 fps, can give you a butter-slow low speed and allow you to do speed ramps up as fast as you want.
From a practical standpoint, the best thing to use for the turntable floor is a slightly diffused piece of plexiglass that matches your background color–e.g. a frosted white for a white background, black for a black background. It will reflect the color of the background and get you pretty close to a seamless background look.
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The simple-but-janky way to do it is to create a bunch of semi-transparent solids, space them at regular intervals from the camera, and then parent them to the camera so that they follow the camera’s movements. As your camera backs away, more of the solids move in front of your objects, and gradually occlude them. Bonus points for using the fractal noise effect on the solids to create billowing cloud shapes.
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There are a bunch of things that could be at work here. Maybe the bitrate is too high. Maybe the flavor of h.264 is slightly different. Maybe the camera needs the EXIF data to be embedded in order to play it. Maybe the camera writes the files to the card in a certain region of the data blocks in order, and copying it to the card puts it out of order.
There’s a reason us naysayers say nay. You may “know” that there’s a workaround, but you really don’t–you hope there’s one. There’s probably a way to do it, but is worth all the time you’ll spend screwing around with it trying to figure it out? Why not just use one of the many options available to you BESIDES this, like playing it back from a computer, playing back directly to a TV via mp4 on a USB stick, pushing out a Blu-Ray disc, using an Atomos recorder, using an Apple TV…the list of really great, proven, useful playback technologies goes on and on. Playing back from the camera is not on that list.
Perhaps if you could shed some light on the intended venue and available playback apparatus, some of us naysayers could give you some helpful advice, rather than just telling you that your proposal is unlikely to work 🙂 What are you trying to accomplish? Maybe we can help you find a better solution.
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Don’t forget to budget for some extra lighting–depending on how fast you’re going, you may need a little extra punch at those speeds!
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My advice: just don’t use autofocus when shooting with a DSLR (yes, I realize it’s technically a mirrorless camera–the principle is the same). Autofocus on stills lenses relies on contrast detection, and is inaccurate, slow, and half the time will not focus on what you need it to. Learn to focus manually, and/or get a small follow focus rig, and you will be INFINITELY happier with the results.
This may not be the answer you’re looking for, but it’s the only good solution. There is no camera setting that will improve the AF performance of a stills camera enough to make it practical to use with good results.
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In Adobe CC apps, there are a few settings that can mitigate the worst of this–one of them is a checkbox for frame-blending, which is basically the interpolation software that Todd was mentioning. I don’t know Avid at all, but if there’s a frame-blending option, you (or your editor) might consider using it.
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Finally, of course, you could just run the video through the PS filter and get exactly what you want:
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/photoshop-apply-filters-clips.html
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Another way to get the “rays of light” effect is to do this:
After you’ve got your image all glassy and ready to go, duplicate that layer. Place an adjustment layer between them. On the adjustment layer, use the CC Light Burst effect, and increase the ray length to something like 180, and set the position of the effect so it matches the direction of the specular highlights on the glass. On the topmost layer, set your blending mode to “Screen.” This lays the glassified image on top of the rays, preventing them from obliterating the image.
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First, pull the key and isolate your model.
Use the Cartoon effect to posterize the model and give her an outline (stained glass has metal pieces between panes). Adjust edges and posterization to your taste. Once it’s posterized and outlined, you should be able to do color replacements on each “step” of the posterization, or just apply a Hue transform. Now you’ve got a colorized image with outlines that should generally animate consistently.
Next, use the CC Glass filter to create the specular highlights of the “glass” on the image. Adjust the depth and distortion to your taste. Finish it up with CC Light Rays to create a backlit translucent effect.
The effect order is crucial in this setup:
Cartoon > Hue/Saturation (or individual color transforms) > CC Glass > CC > Light RaysShort of animating it by hand, this gets you pretty decent results.
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Check out the new Sony PXW X70. Small camcorder format, 10-bit 4:2:2, and XLR inputs. 1080p up to 60 fps.