Conrad Olson
Forum Replies Created
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[Andrew Somers] “Without seeing it, and without knowing the context that it will play in, you can’t say if it is an approach that is useful. 2D roto shapes may or may not work well, and you don’t know what “decent enough” will be for the shot/client/film etc.”
That’s fair enough but you haven’t seen the shot either and are suggesting the most complicated solution possible. Why not go with the simplest solution first and then work up from there if that doesn’t work?
[Andrew Somers] “The point with my post is that this kind of effect is *easiest* to create as a practical on set.”
True. But it’s already shot. It’s not always practical to do things on set or to re-shoot things. As much as we hate ‘fix it in post’ it happens all the time. Spencer’s original question was about how to fix this in After Effect, not how should he have shot this in the first place.
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This is overkill. Some 2D roto shapes and some luma keying will give you a decent enough result.
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Using 3D lights in After Effects is probably over kill. It’s not like you have a 3D model of the tuck or the actor that you can use to cast shadows.
You can probably achieve a lot with some 2D effects.
Find a piece of footage of a view from a car window at night with lights going past. Grade it to crush out all of the darker details and leave you with the lights, then blur it and add it over the shot of the actor. Mess around with the blending modes (try add first) and the opacity. This will give you some moving lights over the actor.
To give it more of a directional look pull some luma keys of the actor or create some roto shapes on one side of their face and apply them to the lighting layer before you add it to the original layer.
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There are loads of ways to do it depending on your camera move.
You might get away with just shotting 2 or 3 ‘similar’ plates, then picking one as your hero, stabilizing the other two then match moving their motion to the hero. The success of this would depend on the complexity of your move and the environment you are in. In the simplest scenario you could just get away with 2D tracking and stabilizing if you are just panning.
You can do the same tracking/stabilizing/matchmove techniques in 3D if you have a more complicated move.
Another option would be to shot it in one take, with two similar looking actors (twins would be perfect). Then paint the first one out of the shot after he teleports and paint the 2nd one out before he arrives.
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I read the description of the shot as just the hand coming out of the water. That would be a much smaller area of water that you would need to keep. If the whole actress breaks the water then you have a very different set of issues.
If the hand makes a big splash as it breaks the water you wouldn’t see the actress through that white water so you could soft matte around that and replace the surrounding flatter water.
You might not need to get rid of every part of the actress. Just the big obvious areas. The audience won’t notice smaller broken up areas.
You might be able to roto bits of her and just grade those areas to be much closer to the colour of the water. That might hide sections within the ripples.
As for the tracking I was talking about tracking the surface of the water so that you could track in patches. Mocha could work for that for sure.
You’re right that if you could re shoot it in muddy water you’d get the best result.
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Personally I think your first suggestion is a very valid solution. Feathered roto works fine when you are blending different patches of water. I’ve done at several times.
Forget the plug-ins you will get a much better result if you can use real footage. You could even just go and shoot your own elements and grade them to match your plate but your tracking would be the biggest issue then. If the camera is moving that much you might get away with some hand tracking.
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Any reason why you can’t just buy a piece of stock footage and use that instead. Clouds aren’t easy to make look real. It’s much better to use real elements if you can.
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Is the drive NTFS? There is a plug-in I had to install to get them working properly with our Macs. I think that was only so we could write to them though. You should be able to read the disc without it.
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Have you tried just using the point tracker to do the stabilize? I don’t think the artifacts are caused by rolling shutter. I think that it might be the warp stabilizer that’s introducing them.
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