Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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So it’s hard to give specific answers without knowing exactly what your problems are, but here are some higher level thoughts on your concerns.
[Chris Wood] “Matte painting – I have some shots on the that I want to make look more mountainous. I’m having trouble getting the images I have to blend in.”
What you need to do for this will depend on the type of shot you’re working with. Whatever the shot, you should start by exporting out a still frame from your piece and doing your matte painting in Photoshop. Matching color and perspective is important here.
If your shot is a panning shot then you can make it easier on yourself and export enough frames to cover the entire pan in one Photoshop file.
If it’s a zooming shot then export the frame with the widest field of view, but once inside Photoshop scale the document up to allow your painting enough resolution for the zoom (the amount will depend how much the shot zooms).
For both panning and zooming shots you’re in luck: 2D tracking should be all that is necessary to get the matte painting to stick convincingly in your scene.
However, if your camera is moving at all then things get more complicated. For a convincing matte painting you’ll need a 3D solve (match move) for the shot. Then you can project the matte painting in a 3D application on to low-res geometry that stands in for the painted elements (mountains). This can definitely take some time to get right.
[Chris Wood] “Compositing a 3D object into a live action footage. How to match move a 3D object so that it appears rock solid on camera.”
This would be match moving again. There are lots of different solutions for this but they all look pretty much the same from a high level:
Track > Solve Camera > Import Camera into 3D Application
What tracker/solver and what 3D app you use is a matter of preference. This can be a specialized skill that careers are built around, so I would encourage you to try and find someone with at least some experience to do it. It’s science, art and a little voodoo magic. That’s just the camera solve though, then you need to do your best to integrate the 3D object into the scene via shading.
If you took notes on the camera’s focal length, “film back” and position (if it’s on a tripod, the distance from the ground to the lens) then these will help a lot.
[Chris Wood] “A character gets his throat slit – I want to composite some blood trickling down his throat. He’s only had his throat exposed for a few frames.”
Probably best done as a practical effect. This will save you time, money and it’ll look better. Buy some corn syrup and food coloring. Mix ’em up how you like and trickle away. Since this is a very short shot (and a close up?) you can get away with a lot.
If you’ve ever seen Silverado, there’s a shot of one of the main characters dropping his revolver that the director realized needed to be emphasized with a close up of the revolver landing in the dirt… only they never shot it. So they went out past the parking lot of the production facility with a camera and a gun and dropped it in some dirt. You’d never know watching the film.
If you do re-shoot then try to match any details that are visible: clothing, jewelry, lighting, skin tone, etc. Some necks might be more recognizable than dirt 🙂
[Chris Wood] “Another characters get a blade through the throat. I want to recreate this in 3D and use matchmoving to composite it bursting through the characters neck.”
Depending on the shot this could be crazy hard or relatively simple. I can’t say for sure based on your description, but it sounds like you have an edit as the blade hits the throat and the fx shot is simply the blade coming out the other side of the neck. Editing will definitely help sell this. The approach and difficulty of the effect itself (as with most of these) will depend on the shot.
Sorry if that wasn’t very helpful but it’s difficult coming to the table without knowing what was planned and shot.
Darby Edelen
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What effect are you using to apply your DOF in After Effects? This one is my favorite:
https://www.frischluft.com/lenscare/index.php
Give it a try and see if it handles the scene any better.
That said, this blur bleed at the edges of overlapping objects is a problem with all the post DOF effects I’m aware of. I believe it has to do with the effect estimating the coverage of the objects and not quite getting it right.
Darby Edelen
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To expand on Dan’s comments, the position and scale properties are both vector properties with 2 elements. That is to say that they have an X and a Y component. You access these elements by calling the variable with the index of the element you want in brackets:
value[0]The above returns the first (numbering starts from 0) element in the vector (the X value for scale and position).
value[1]The above returns the second element in the vector (this is the Y value for scale and position).
When you call the wiggle() function it returns a vector of the same size as the property that its being called from:
wiggle(1,5);So the above returns a vector with 2 elements (X = [0] and Y = [1]) for position and scale, while it returns a scalar value for rotation and other scalar properties.
Darby Edelen
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[andrew donaldson] “Baseline profile is a feature of H264 encoding, which doesn’t seem to be supported by alot of Android tablets (crazy i know), which is why we are using FFmpeg as a blanket solution for all OS’s.”
Ah, I hadn’t considered that.
I’ve only encoded video for playback specifically on Tegra devices, but I can definitely say that H.264 baseline profile works beautifully in that case.
Are there specific tablets you’re having trouble supporting?
Darby Edelen
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I’m not quite sure what you’re describing.
You’re setting keyframes at some time, moving down the timeline and then adjusting the camera position? That should work fine.
Can you describe the way the camera movement is misbehaving in more detail?
Darby Edelen
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That bitrate should not be a problem. However, some older or low end android tablets may not be able to handle high or even main profile MPEG-4/AVC.
The best way I’ve found to ensure compatibility is to encode with the baseline profile. You can still use level 5.1 for 1080p content.
Darby Edelen
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How does ReelSmart Motion Blur work for you when you don’t give it motion vectors?
That would generally be the route I’d take for adding motion blur. You can also do it with the Time > Timewarp effect (set speed to 100% and enable motion blur).
Your characters are moving very slowly in the scene you’ve provided, so you’ll have to increase the shutter angle to an insanely high value to get dramatic motion blur (I’d start at 1440° and go up from there).
This amount of motion will of course look unreal on such a slow moving clip, but I assume that’s part of the goal.
Darby Edelen
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[Mariusz Åšlemp] “After i deform matrix object and its work well, but i need to use ThinkingParticles instead of standard emmiter and i have no object to put into matrix object field.”
You can put the Thinking Particles group into the Object field.
Darby Edelen
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The “Time Displacement” effect under Effect > Time will do this.
Works like a displacement map, only for time!
Darby Edelen
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Having something of known size for the eye to refer to will certainly help. In addition, anything you can do to play with perspective to give it a sense of scale will help. Wider angle lens on the camera. Tilting the camera so that it has to look up at the text.
Shadows can also help give something a greater sense of scale. Generally the shadows that large objects cast will appear hard (very little shadow diffusion). You can also exaggerate the lighting to cast long shadows.
This all depends on what else is in your composition though.
Darby Edelen