[Sharif Elnaggar]

Hey Phil…I’ve done this before and yes you are correct. It involves cutting out the elements in the photo which mainly would be the characters and extracting them from the background. After that you would have to clone the cutouts in the background but keeping in mind that you would want the cutout character to mostly cover any messy smudges from cloning. After preparing the layers, in After Effects be sure to give each character its own separate Z depth in position after enabling the 3D layer.It gives it that nice 3d look you see here.

It would also help if you would add a camera to the scene with depth of field option enabled.

Best of luck.

[Sharif Elnaggar]

Hey Nils…did you try placing that 2d footage as an environment on a material?
just go to the material editor and make sure you put a check on environment and then place your 2d footage there…hope that works for u

[Sharif Elnaggar]

Hey Chris.. If the people are not moving around alot in the video.. I would probably just go to photoshop and make a path of the figures in the movie and export to illustrator as a path (.ai extension) and drop that path in cinema 4d. Just extrude it and try to match frame it to the video you have and then apply a composite modifier and select matte object.
It would act as a matte..therefore giving you that result you are looking for…but as i said…it wont work if those people are moving around aot.
hope this works.

[Sharif Elnaggar]

use EDIUS pro 4 to import the clips and from there you can export uncompressed ..be sure to look at your clips info for determing the correct format size when making a new project in edius.