Chris Smith
Forum Replies Created
-
I’m not in front of AE right now, but the new AE7 lens blur has a matte for it’s DOF built in. I was playing with it when it first came out. I put a grad in the matte channel and did swing/tilt effects.
Put lens blur on your RGB channel and use the depth pass as your the matte input on the lens blur.
Because you don’t want your depth channel used to just mix in the blur because that’s not how a lens really works, that will just create diffusion where it’s not 100% blurred or clean. The matte input on the lens blur does what a real lens does which is to truly defoucus by the amount in your matte.
Sorry if I’m not very specific as I’m going on memory until I see it in front of me.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
You mentioned HD in your title, but mentioned SD resolution. If you are working at HD resolution, it’s 16:9 anyways. If it is SD, then like Steve said do your graphics in 16:9 and make a 16:9 SD DVD. But set the playback DVD in 16:9 mode as well. For example my little Sony DVD player if you turn it on w/o a disk in it, you can get to menu pages to set it to 16:9. So when it has 16:9 material on it, it will be properly displayed on the screen.
If you do your graphics at 4:3, then yes you will have to set the Plasma to 4:3 but you will get cropped sides (How I watch SD TV). But you can, if it doesn’t bother you, set it to “Full screen” which stretches the image (like you usually see in Bars where they play sports and news streched out) which drives me nutz but apparently doesn’t bother many ppl.
Side note, make sure your graphics never stall on any one image for more than a brief moment or after your graphics loop on it for a while you can seriously damage the screen from permanent images being left on it. A buddy tried to sell me some Plasmas cheap that had been in a bar. We turned them on but to a black image and I could see the stripes from the CNBC Stock ticker permanently in the image. No deal.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Looks like a basic glow or duplicated layer blurred and ADD moded back on top.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Wow, great link. And from the apps I’ve laid my hands on, I couldn’t agree more.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
K, here is the best I could do:
https://sugarfilmproduction.com/dayfornightcomp.jpg
I didn’t do any special masking that would have been imposiible in motion.
However, Even if this was shot on film, transferred to 16 bit uncompressed files, It would only work marginally better because I wouldn’t get so much fringing in the trees and edges from the compression. (although I didn’t expand the matte like Steve suggested).
But Ideally, this would have been shot at full exposure with good strong lighting. There is just almost no data to work with.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Reflecting what Steve said, the bigger issue is that you have severly underexposed subjects in the shot. So I think doing a day-for-night effect should be way down on your priorty list. If you succeed, then you have a picture of a campfire and the vague notion that there are trees or actors in the shot.
BUT, that being said, looking at the shot how I would pull the matte is using the color filters to isolate the blue channel. Then run this through levels to crush down the image so the trees and the guys head are decently black and the sky is white. Then throw in a garbage matte or 2 to block out the part of the image with the campfire. So in the end all of your image is black with just the areas around the trees and head white (Where the sky is).
Then use this as a luma matte on whatever techniques you are going to use to make it night (darkeing, tinting, a moon?).
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Imagemodeler and a handfull of other programs do this. The technique is called “Photogrammetry”. And you don’t need a helicopter and motion video. Just a few high res stills will do fine. Animate the camera digitally later after the model is built to get an orbit effect.
It all started here with research Paul Debevec did:
https://debevec.org/Campanile/
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
-
-
I think you’ll find that (other than using clouds to hide a transition) that a lot of the time it’s scaling into hi-res graphics very quickly with motion blur on so you don’t notice the change. Keying stuff fast enough with MB will hide a LOT of stuff.
Side note: My buddy did a spot where the cam was flying into a little world he made and the clouds were Particular. They looked fantastic and of course respect the 3D placement of an AE cam.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com