[Graham Quince]

Thanks for the response Tim. I’d hoped there might be a solution, but feared the worst. We switched to S-Video from the camera and that’s cleared up the biggest issues. I think we had a signal bleed problem, which is a shame because we were looking at some cheap 3CCD cameras, but they don’t have S-Video out.

Normally I’d agree with you on live keying, but this is for non-media students to turn around presentations quickly, mainly to help build confidence so I wanted a no-learning-curve solution.

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

I’d just like to add that if you use the free lagarith codec, you can export the video with alpha and get a really great lossless compression

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

Replacing the AE noises??? That would be like getting rid of a family pet. I’ve know that goat since 5.5 (especially when I had Win Me). Yes, it’s vaguely unpleasant and its shocked BAAA means there’s trouble ahead but at least she doesn’t widdle on the carpet.

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

I’m pretty much in the same boat. And generally buy one plugin a year with money Christmas money I have. About five years ago I got a copy of Particle Illusion SE off the front cover of a magazine, Digit. This year I finally bought PI3 and wow!, so much better and easier to use.

I’ve also picked up other packages from magazines and it’s certainly a way to get started. You have to be careful though, sometimes companies offer evaulation versions for download and they do mean evaluation, not non-commercial. I saw a post here a few years ago when Trapcode stomped on a guy
for extended use of an evaluation version of their plugin.

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

The biggest headache I can see will be getting the join to match up. I think you are in for some rotoscoping even with painting people green.

Make sure you film background plates on location, as some times the dog’s head won’t completely cover the humans. Instead of junk matting the hair, have you considered getting some green swim caps or balaclavas, that way you might not even need to paint the face?

I like the shirts and collars idea, you may be able to hide the join with a feathered mask. Good luck and I’d love to see how this turns out.

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

The best way is to render this out in C4D. Change your render settings to account for NTSC or PAL (if that’s what you’re doing of course) and on the same tab is an export for After Effects option, save an aec file.

Render out your animation as an image sequence – the default if TIFF, but for basic stuff I use jpeg (it’s smaller). Then open AE, choose import and import your .aec file and AE will bring in not just your image sequence but also the position of the 3D camera, and lights.

Hope that helps

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

I did this exact set up for our school production last month. You want to use black as your alpha channel equivalent. There’s no such thing as black light (not getting into UV here), black is the absence of light, so what your projector throw out is the faintest of faint white. If you project a black screen onto a black curtain, you get a very faint grey square. If you project white you get a strong white square.

We mounted the projectors as close to the screens as possible and keystoned the lens correction. We did this so our actors could get really close to the backdrop without getting in the way of the projection. At times it looked like we’d rear-projected they were so close.

If you keep your stage lights off the backdrop, there is no problem with the projector being washed out.

The only other advice I can offer is to keep the cables out of the way. One of our kids managed to kick the VGA cable out of the PC on opening night and we had to wait for the interval to reset.

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

That was really inspirational. It’s wonderful to see how you combined all those different techniques to such good effect.

Daniel, I’m pretty sure that everything shown in that video can be achieved using the tutorials posted here. Just with a LOT of work and planning!

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

The closer you are to a black hole, the greater the gravity pull. So in theory if you fall in feet first, your feet would be stretched away from you, leading to (and I swear this is genuine) spaghettification. The easiest way to get this look I reckon would be to use one of the distort effects like bulge or optics compensation.

Hope that helps

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films

[Graham Quince]

For me, the easiest way to do this would be to render out that section of your sequence as a jpg sequence. you can set the compression really low to get the artifacting. Then I’d bring it back in and fade it in and out as wanted. You could spend a lot of time messing with edge filters, but this would be the quickest that i can think of.

Graham

https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films