IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 |
(music playing)
| | 00:04 |
Hi, I'm Jeff Foster, video producer,
compositor, and visual effects artist,
| | 00:08 |
and author of The Green Screen Handbook.
I've been working with blue and green
| | 00:13 |
screen compositing for video, TV, and
feature films for nearly two decades.
| | 00:17 |
And I've taught motion graphics and
compositing workshops and seminars internationally.
| | 00:22 |
I'm excited to bring you this workshop
where I get into the details of my work
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flow techniques using various projects to
help you fully understand the concepts of
| | 00:29 |
compositing in Adobe After Effects.
I'll cover the art of Roto-painting and
| | 00:35 |
refining your masks with paint stokes for
a softer more believable composite.
| | 00:40 |
We'll explore multi past mats and
multiple key layers to get the best
| | 00:44 |
results even when working with impossible
footage.
| | 00:48 |
I'll share with you tips and tricks on
creating lighting in a scene and your subjects.
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Motion tracking and match moving and
other cheats I used to get the job done
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quickly and professionally.
You'll learn tips and techniques for real
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world projects.
I see this course as a great chance to
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share with you what I've learned as we
build your compositing skills together.
| | 01:09 |
Now I hope you're ready to dig in.
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1. Roto-Painting Techniques with a Wacom TabletBeyond the Roto Brush| 00:02 |
I like to show you how I use the Wacom
tablet, with After Effects to control my
| | 00:06 |
Roto brush strokes and we'll use this
footage here.
| | 00:10 |
This is a project you'll find in your
chapter one folder.
| | 00:14 |
This is an actual segment that was used
in a Hollywood film.
| | 00:18 |
It's called the Currier.
Put out by Arclight Films.
| | 00:22 |
It is produced by Films in Motion.
And they gave us permission to use this project.
| | 00:28 |
And this is great, because it
incorporates a lot of different things.
| | 00:32 |
If you look at the first comp here, which
is just raw.
| | 00:36 |
It's a foreground and background plate.
Well this guy is jumping off of the top
| | 00:41 |
of this roller coaster to save the girl,
he's the hero.
| | 00:45 |
So we're going to go onto green screen
Roto intermediate one which has already
| | 00:50 |
some vector objects done in it.
It's got the rope, it's already been put
| | 00:56 |
in here.
So, that's just a shape which is a stroke
| | 01:00 |
and the railings the Track mask is
already in.
| | 01:05 |
It's a locked off shot so it doesn't move
and then the board which goes flying off
| | 01:09 |
as he crashes through the railing.
That goes flying out and we have just
| | 01:14 |
roto masked that cause it's a solid
object.
| | 01:18 |
We have to roto him now because the green
screen's fairly unusable.
| | 01:21 |
We've got this big fold in the center
here which creates a big line.
| | 01:25 |
Got all these deep wrinkles in here
because he's probably done this a couple
| | 01:27 |
times and they didn't straighten it out,
so that's a problem.
| | 01:31 |
But the biggest problem is he jumps off
way beyond the camera angle of him in the
| | 01:35 |
green screen.
So they didn't really plan that out that well.
| | 01:40 |
So we have to go in there and roto him
out.
| | 01:43 |
But we will use very little edges of the
green screen.
| | 01:48 |
We will key those out when we're all done
with the Roto brush.
| | 01:50 |
The Roto brush gets us about 99% of the
way there.
| | 01:53 |
So the first thing I do is I take this
layer here, it's a CVX-041.
| | 01:59 |
That was the actual clip number, so I
just left that in there, and we're going
| | 02:02 |
to duplicate that.
And I'm going to rename it, so that it
| | 02:06 |
makes sense.
And I will call this Hero Jumping Roto,
| | 02:11 |
and that way I know the hero's jumping
and we're going to roto him out.
| | 02:17 |
I'm going to move that right up to the top
here.
| | 02:21 |
So, what I like to do when I'm doing my
other masking, is I leave the original
| | 02:25 |
layer on so I can look back and forth.
So I'm going to turn that off so that as
| | 02:29 |
we're rotoing, we can go back and forth,
and look and see what our results are.
| | 02:34 |
So, to activate this, I'm going to
double-click this layer, the Hero Jumping
| | 02:39 |
Roto layer.
And I'm going to go to 100%, I don't need
| | 02:43 |
to be at 200, at this point.
And I'm just going ahead and make sure
| | 02:47 |
that my Roto brush is selected here.
Now I've got a fairly fat brush here.
| | 02:52 |
I can, change the size in here, on the
Wacom in tablet.
| | 02:55 |
But the nice thing about using the Wacom
for this is I'm painting instead of
| | 02:59 |
scrubbing with a big bar of soap on the
rope.
| | 03:04 |
I can go in here and then my pressure
sensitivity allows me to get into other
| | 03:08 |
areas that are a little harder when
you've got one, one size brush.
| | 03:13 |
So grab my spacebar or, I've actually
used the programmable buttons on the
| | 03:18 |
N204/g, I don't have to touch my keyboard
at all.
| | 03:22 |
I've got all my buttons already
programmed here.
| | 03:24 |
So, I can grab the deselect and, Deselect
this range.
| | 03:30 |
And move up.
And grab a little bit of this area here.
| | 03:35 |
I'd rather have more information than not
enough, especially where there's green
| | 03:38 |
screen 'cuz I know I'll be able to key
some of that out or paint it out later.
| | 03:43 |
So, it's much easier to get rid of, extra
material than it is to not have enough
| | 03:47 |
material and then go in and have to fake
it in later or come back and re-roto things.
| | 03:53 |
So going to just get rid of a little bit
there and going to get rid of this rope, I
| | 03:56 |
don't want to thinking about that.
So that's my first frame of my roto.
| | 04:02 |
And yeah going to grab a little bit more of
his hair up here because again I'd rather
| | 04:07 |
have more than not enough.
And same here on it's sleeve.
| | 04:12 |
So there's a little bit of motion blur in
there.
| | 04:15 |
And the Roto brush does a pretty
remarkable job of finding that motion
| | 04:20 |
blur and bringing it back in.
So that's my first frame.
| | 04:24 |
I'm going to come down one frame and come up
here, grab his head, which got.
| | 04:32 |
Forgotten by the Roto brush 'cuz he moved
beyond a range.
| | 04:36 |
So it takes a few frames for it to learn
what's going on.
| | 04:40 |
And grab a little bit of the corner of
his jacket there.
| | 04:43 |
And you can see that, using the Wacom
tablet, I've got brush control here.
| | 04:47 |
So it's a very intuitive process of kind
of painting in areas.
| | 04:52 |
And just using your pressure sensitivity
to control your actual brush size.
| | 04:56 |
How much material you're selecting there.
So I just keep working on down the line.
| | 05:04 |
Okay, so I've completed my roto process
all the way down here.
| | 05:16 |
And I've got a pretty clean roto, and I'm
pretty happy with as it is, and I've
| | 05:20 |
tried to take in consideration.
Capitalize on much of the smoothest parts
| | 05:26 |
of the green screen.
And not worry about trying to knock any
| | 05:29 |
of that out, because I like the amount of
motion blur that's going on in there.
| | 05:36 |
That's kind of important so I want to keep
as much of that in as possible.
| | 05:39 |
So I'm all done here, now I hit the
Freeze button, and that's important to do.
| | 05:44 |
As soon as you're done with your last
frame, or a segment.
| | 05:47 |
So, that way nothing weird happens later
on in either your comps or when you're rendering.
| | 05:55 |
I've had problems with that in the past
where it's just created blobs of silliness.
| | 06:00 |
So anyway the important part here is that
we got a decent roto here.
| | 06:04 |
Now I come over here to the Roto brush
settings and this is where the magic happens.
| | 06:08 |
I can either smooth out my roto more.
Well this is fairly small in the scene,
| | 06:14 |
if I do a fit we'll see it's actually
like 38% here.
| | 06:18 |
And this is actually a smaller resolution
than what I had to work with.
| | 06:23 |
I was working in 4k files right out of a
red cam so.
| | 06:27 |
Pretty intense and really huge files.
But lots of data to work with.
| | 06:30 |
So it was actually wonderful.
But we've got a much smaller version here
| | 06:34 |
to work with.
And I don't want to oversmooth my character
| | 06:37 |
at all because, the problems is, is when
you smooth things.
| | 06:41 |
Well, we can go ahead and apply it.
And we've already applied our, roto.
| | 06:45 |
So, I hit Smooth, and what that does is,
it actually straightens out some of our lines.
| | 06:52 |
And that's fine if you have really smooth
edges that you want to work with.
| | 06:58 |
But in a case like this, I want it to
really be thinking about all the little
| | 07:01 |
nuances, and everything.
So I'm going to leave my smoothing at two
| | 07:06 |
where it was and it's thinking a little
more.
| | 07:09 |
I will however, probably increase my
feathering a bit and I'm going to bring that
| | 07:13 |
up to say about 35 or 40.
I'll go to 40 with it.
| | 07:19 |
See how that works.
40.
| | 07:21 |
Okay.
And I'm not doing any choking on it at all.
| | 07:26 |
If I want to see this go back and forth and
see what I'm actually doing.
| | 07:31 |
Well then I can see, here's the effect
that I'm having with my Roto brush, and
| | 07:35 |
do a quick RAM preview here to watch what
that's doing.
| | 07:40 |
And you can see there's areas where I've
allowed the green to go ahead and fill up
| | 07:44 |
between his legs.
Because it was easier than trying to
| | 07:47 |
figure out, well.
I'm going to have to paint that out, or
| | 07:50 |
whatever, I'll just let the keyer, key
that out.
| | 07:54 |
So, I've got him here, so, I do have some
issues here with the wrinkles in there, I
| | 07:58 |
may have to paint those out later on.
That's okay.
| | 08:03 |
It's only one or two frames.
It's actually one frame so that's easy
| | 08:06 |
enough to do.
So I look here and then the green fills
| | 08:09 |
in between his legs there.
So you can see the effectiveness of your matte.
| | 08:15 |
Well we're not done yet, the last thing
I'd like to do here is to hit this refine
| | 08:19 |
Matte button here.
And if we move this over so you can read
| | 08:23 |
it, it actually compensates for motion
blur.
| | 08:27 |
And a little edge decontamination.
And a lot of times this does a really
| | 08:30 |
good job just in the default settings.
So I'm going to go and look and see how
| | 08:34 |
that's working, here.
And we'll see that is does even a better
| | 08:38 |
job of pulling out some of the edge
artifacts and even some of the green
| | 08:43 |
screen's gone now too.
Except for the areas that we really need,
| | 08:49 |
so I'm going to let that RAM preview, and
then we can take a look at that.
| | 08:53 |
But using the Wacom tablet, again, it's a
workflow that I find works with the Roto brush.
| | 08:59 |
It goes on to my paint modes and anything
else that I use that's brush oriented
| | 09:02 |
like that, where I'm not using the mouse.
And it gives me just a lot more control,
| | 09:10 |
and the programmable controls on the
Wacom tablet are just phenomenal.
| | 09:18 |
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| Roto-painting mattes| 00:02 |
So, now that I have my character rotoed
out with Roto brush, and I've got that
| | 00:07 |
layer frozen.
What I like to do next is actually create
| | 00:12 |
a movie from this layer, so that I don't
have to work on the actual Roto layer.
| | 00:20 |
So, I turn off everything except for just
this layer.
| | 00:24 |
So, I've got this black alpha out here.
And I render out a movie and bring that
| | 00:29 |
back in as a movie with an alpha.
I've already got one rendered out here
| | 00:35 |
that I can use.
I just drag that down into my project.
| | 00:39 |
And I can hide this guy, a Roto layer,
and I can bring in all of my other
| | 00:44 |
layers, as I want to make them visible.
So, now I've got just a movie, I don't
| | 00:51 |
have data that I'm trying to push, and
that speeds up my machine quite a bit.
| | 00:57 |
Plus it allows me to go in there and
modify this movie, or paint on this movie
| | 01:01 |
layer, and it doesn't affect any edge
data or any masking data.
| | 01:06 |
It's not trying to make theINAUDIBLE
work too hard.
| | 01:09 |
So, the first thing I do is come in here
and apply some key light.
| | 01:14 |
I like to get rid of the green screen, so
I know what I'm going to be painting on.
| | 01:17 |
So, I find an area here where there's a
little bit of the green showing.
| | 01:25 |
Find a frame here that has enough green
to grab and go up 100% and there's
| | 01:30 |
probably enough right there.
So, I'm going to apply Keylight.
| | 01:37 |
So, Key > Keylight.
Going to use my Eyedropper and grab that
| | 01:45 |
little section of green right there.
Does a first pass, so we'll go to our
| | 01:50 |
Screen Matte and move up here I want to
make sure I try to get as much of the
| | 01:55 |
noise as possible.
So, I'm going to Screen Matte.
| | 02:00 |
And clip white.
I'll bring that down till most of the
| | 02:04 |
noise is out of his pants and his arms.
There, the sleeve on his jacket.
| | 02:09 |
So, that looks pretty good.
Then come back to my final result.
| | 02:14 |
And what I typically do, is not use this
layer as my actual final layer.
| | 02:20 |
I use this as a mask layer.
So, I'll copy my original layer,
| | 02:25 |
duplicate it, Cmd+D or Ctrl+D on the PC.
And rename it, and I'll just call it Hero Overlay.
| | 02:36 |
So, what I do here is I put this right up
underneath my Matte movie.
| | 02:43 |
And I make it visible.
And then I come up to Layer > Track Matte
| | 02:49 |
> Alpha Matte.
And now, of course, I've got some of my
| | 02:53 |
green spill still coming back in there.
So, I just do a real general Keylight.
| | 02:59 |
Effect on there.
So, instead of selecting a green color
| | 03:04 |
with a Eyedropper.
I just go out here and pick a pure green
| | 03:08 |
and get close go 0, 255, 0 that's good
pure green.
| | 03:13 |
Pick that and I leave it.
And that allows me to pull out all of the
| | 03:18 |
green out of this image, without
affecting any of the subtleties of any
| | 03:23 |
noise or anything that's going on in
here.
| | 03:28 |
And that just gives me a really nice
clean look.
| | 03:31 |
So, as opposed to the fully keyed
version.
| | 03:34 |
So, what I'm going to do though is that's
just my overlay, I'm going to actually
| | 03:38 |
paint on my Roto matte layer.
So, I'm going to double-click that, so I
| | 03:43 |
can see what's going on here.
And bring him down.
| | 03:48 |
And use my Wacom tablet again, to cycle
through all of these shots and see where
| | 03:54 |
I need to go in and paint out some areas.
I'm going to use the Eraser tool.
| | 04:02 |
At this point, I don't need thatLAUGH
big of a brush.
| | 04:04 |
It right now, so I'm going to bring that
down.
| | 04:08 |
But I'm going to use one that looks like
it's probably too big.
| | 04:13 |
In some areas, because if you use your
brush out around the edges and you have a
| | 04:17 |
fat brush, then it's going to come in
very subtly.
| | 04:22 |
Because you have to remember, I'm going to
punch a hole in his back here to demonstrate.
| | 04:26 |
But if you see how wide the brush goes
out.
| | 04:32 |
And you have all these soft edges all
around the edge of the brush.
| | 04:36 |
Well, obviously, we don't want a bazooka
hole in the middle of him, so we'll undo that.
| | 04:41 |
But I do want to be able to come in and
just come in very subtly around the top
| | 04:45 |
of his head there.
Cuz there's going to be motion blur, that I
| | 04:49 |
want to make sure retains in there.
And I'll go back a frame, forward a frame.
| | 04:57 |
I can see I need to do that again, here.
And I just concentrate, when I've got a
| | 05:00 |
shot this short.
This is less than a second long.
| | 05:05 |
It's only 20 frames long.
I only concentrate on one part of the
| | 05:09 |
subject at a time.
So, right now I'm just looking at the top
| | 05:13 |
of his head.
I probably have other areas I need to
| | 05:15 |
work on too, but this way I can work on
just one segment at at time.
| | 05:20 |
Kind of work my way down, and that way
I'm really concentrating on how that edge
| | 05:24 |
is going, step by step.
Because it's real easy to miss something,
| | 05:30 |
if you're jumping all around, or
overpaint something, so you actually
| | 05:33 |
introduce more problems than you're
fixing.
| | 05:37 |
So, it's really important, to, really
focus on going back and forth, back and
| | 05:41 |
forth, and making sure you're not
creating more problems than you're fixing here.
| | 05:47 |
So, you know, sometimes it's just a
matter of softening it up again here.
| | 05:50 |
Now, we use the Roto brush and we had a
40% feather on there.
| | 05:56 |
That's the maximum.
And it only goes so far, especially with
| | 06:00 |
the motion blurry taking over that
actually creates some more hair.
| | 06:05 |
So, there's points in here where you want
to soften up an edge that might be a
| | 06:09 |
little bit too harsh and may make the
composite not look as believable.
| | 06:15 |
So, you want to kind of knock those back a
bit.
| | 06:18 |
And this is just a great way to be able
to do that is using the Eraser tool with
| | 06:21 |
the Wacom tablet to go frame by frame.
So, I'll just continue to do this until I
| | 06:27 |
get all the way through.
My whole shot sequence and play with this
| | 06:32 |
and we'll come back and we'll take it to
the next level.
| | 06:38 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Roto-painting details| 00:00 |
Continuining with Roto painting, I like
to work in a workflow and normally with a
| | 00:05 |
larger resolution higher resolution
monitor.
| | 00:10 |
I've got a lot more space to do that than
we do in this training video.
| | 00:16 |
But I like to be able to see, what's
going on.
| | 00:18 |
It may look like everything's all clean
here everything looks great and everything.
| | 00:23 |
But when I look at my composite, I start
seeing some strange artifacts showing up
| | 00:26 |
in here.
And I wonder if okay, well is that
| | 00:28 |
actually like a streak in his hair or is
there something that's blending in there?
| | 00:34 |
I just have to turn on the original layer
underneath and I can see there's actually
| | 00:37 |
a couple railings here that are coming
down in his hair.
| | 00:41 |
So I have to kind of paint those out.
And the best way to do this is to
| | 00:45 |
actually move your windows around where
you can see a little better.
| | 00:49 |
So here I'm going to grab this panel.
I'm going to move it over to the right so that
| | 00:55 |
now I've got two windows here.
Make a little bit more room for myself here.
| | 01:01 |
And then I can just kind of move things
into place.
| | 01:05 |
Now I can see what I'm actually painting
on, so if I'm going in here and painting
| | 01:10 |
out some of that.
Try to bring it down just a little bit
| | 01:14 |
and we'll apply some motion blur
afterwards to fix that a little more.
| | 01:20 |
But now I can actually see what it is
that I'm actually contributing to here
| | 01:24 |
and I can feather that a little more.
I can really come in here and work the
| | 01:31 |
details around my composite.
And that's really what it comes down to
| | 01:36 |
is what's believable what's going to work.
And I don't want to remove so much that
| | 01:40 |
it's not realistic anymore either, or
looks like he's got too much of a haircut.
| | 01:46 |
But he is moving at a pretty quick clip
here, so.
| | 01:50 |
I'm going to undo that, I did him a little bit
too much and see, that's something that
| | 01:53 |
you can't tell looking here.
Against the black it doesn't look like
| | 01:57 |
you're doing as much.
But then when you look over here you see
| | 02:00 |
wow, you're really cutting away quite a
bit there.
| | 02:03 |
And it's really important to be able to
see that and undo what you need as you
| | 02:06 |
need to here.
So, come back here.
| | 02:09 |
Work that in a little bit more.
Work that out.
| | 02:12 |
And then I can work my way down the line
here till I see that I'm getting rid of
| | 02:16 |
all the crazy stuff that's going on in
here.
| | 02:20 |
So, right now I'm working on greenscreen
Roto Intermediate 3 Comp.
| | 02:24 |
You can follow along and, and do this
part of it as well.
| | 02:29 |
But this is just a practice issue you
just need to go through practice and
| | 02:33 |
practice and practice.
So I recommend that you utilize these
| | 02:38 |
comps that I've created here for you to
be able to do that and then just go in
| | 02:42 |
and refine your brush skills.
And you can see how easy it is to go to
| | 02:48 |
far each time there.
I just hit undo, come back in paint a
| | 02:51 |
little more.
And you know, once you're in the flow of
| | 02:55 |
working on a particular shot and you're
going down the line working little by
| | 02:58 |
little by little.
You kind of get a feel for how much you
| | 03:03 |
can remove and how much you can't.
And I'm not to worried here in the areas
| | 03:07 |
around his hand because even though it's
light there I see that my composite is
| | 03:11 |
against a light area out here.
So that's fine I'm going to leave that alone
| | 03:16 |
I'm not going to worry about that too much.
And why introduce more problems if you
| | 03:19 |
don't have to.
So, and I can see there's a hole there
| | 03:23 |
that got left out.
And just a little bit of ghosting here on
| | 03:27 |
the top.
I'll come down and take care of that.
| | 03:30 |
So, you really just want to work as
little as possible just to get the story across.
| | 03:38 |
And go through here.
And he's going at a pretty quick clip.
| | 03:43 |
I've got a couple areas there, I've gotta
a little too soft there.
| | 03:46 |
But some of that might be taken care of
when I apply motion blur to it.
| | 03:53 |
Now I've got real smart motion blur that
I use.
| | 03:58 |
And I would use that on the, actually the
Overlay layer not the Matte layer so that
| | 04:04 |
is a third party effect that you have to
get and it's pretty affordable.
| | 04:13 |
It's RE Vision Effects makes it, and I
just apply RSMB to it, and we move this out.
| | 04:21 |
Shrink that up a little bit and then I
can look and see how much I want to apply
| | 04:27 |
to this layer.
I'm going to go ahead and crank that up,
| | 04:31 |
just to see what it does.
What it does is it looks at all the
| | 04:35 |
pixels on a layer and I do it
post-matting so that way it creates nice
| | 04:39 |
edges for me.
So, if I want to see this blown up here.
| | 04:46 |
Let me just do a, a quick grand preview
and we can see I didn't paint out some of
| | 04:50 |
those earlier edges.
So, you see some glows around there.
| | 04:54 |
But the areas here where I did paint out.
It will start to kind of feather though a
| | 04:59 |
little bit so we'll see a much more
natural movement there of all of the elements.
| | 05:05 |
So that's something to play with.
Get at least the trial version of it and
| | 05:10 |
play with it but a real smart motion blur
definitely a compositors friend when
| | 05:13 |
you've got stuff moving and you have to
Roto them out.
| | 05:17 |
It reintroduces motion blur in a natural
way.
| | 05:20 |
And it doesn't look at the edges
necessarily.
| | 05:24 |
It looks at the pixels in motion.
So, it looks at the whole frame.
| | 05:27 |
And it does a just a beautiful job of it.
So in conclusion of this particular
| | 05:32 |
video, I just want to reinforce.
It takes a lot of practice to get all
| | 05:36 |
those fine details in there.
Make sure you're not working too heavy on
| | 05:41 |
any one spot.
As you can see I, I did here in a couple
| | 05:44 |
spots where I've got a little bit too
much taken out in comparison.
| | 05:48 |
What I could do here is probably, maybe
feather a little more preceding that area.
| | 05:56 |
In that way, it won't look as harsh and
you just kind of work back and forth.
| | 06:00 |
That's why it a really important to look
at one area at a time work on that area
| | 06:02 |
until it looks natural and smooth.
It doesn't look jarring between one frame
| | 06:06 |
or another and it looks very natural.
So just practice, practice, practice on
| | 06:12 |
these pieces that I've given you here.
| | 06:17 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Correcting paint strokes over time| 00:02 |
One thing that typically happens is,
you'll work on something and you'll be
| | 00:06 |
working on it for an hour or two.
And then you're going back and you're
| | 00:10 |
realizing, I made a mistake about a half
an hour ago and I've saved the project.
| | 00:16 |
I don't have any undos.
What do I do now?
| | 00:19 |
Do I have to start over?
The nice thing about painting in After
| | 00:22 |
Effects versus going in and trying to do
it frame by frame in like Photoshop or
| | 00:26 |
something, is that everything is
non-destructible.
| | 00:31 |
So I've got my rotomat here, which I've
been using the Erasing tool on and painting.
| | 00:36 |
And I just open that up and it's under
effects because your paint is an effect.
| | 00:42 |
You just twirl that down, and every
single brush stroke that you've made is a
| | 00:46 |
recorded stroke in here.
So if say, I come in here and I select
| | 00:51 |
this particular stroke, this is the area
I'm having trouble with is right there.
| | 01:00 |
Well, I can actually select the stroke
and see the actual stroke that's in there.
| | 01:06 |
And I can hide it and make it visible or
invisible or I can just delete it all
| | 01:10 |
together and paint a new stroke in there.
So, there is a, a go-back timeLAUGH here.
| | 01:18 |
And that's why it's really important to
do this type of work in After Effects and
| | 01:23 |
not try to go out there, paint everything
out in Photoshop, and bring it back in.
| | 01:30 |
The paint tools are here.
And the beauty is, is they're reversible,
| | 01:33 |
they're non destructive.
And we do have these editing capabilities.
| | 01:38 |
So another thing, while I have this
stroke selected.
| | 01:42 |
Say I want to just replace the stroke
with another stroke I would actually
| | 01:47 |
select that stroke come in here and do
another stroke.
| | 01:52 |
And that actually replaces the stroke in
question if you have it selected.
| | 01:59 |
I typically don't do that because you
can't really see what you're doing as
| | 02:02 |
well cuz you see the old stroke as well.
So it's easier to just go in there if you
| | 02:07 |
don't want the stroke you just delete it,
you know, and paint a new stroke in and
| | 02:10 |
then it'll just add it later on in the
line.
| | 02:14 |
But it doesn't really matter what order
these paint strokes are because it's all
| | 02:18 |
about time.
We're working on a timeline.
| | 02:21 |
So you can see I've got strokes all up
and down here in this particular frame.
| | 02:25 |
And see there's several strokes for each
frame and some of these happened early on.
| | 02:31 |
I've got several there, I've got two
there, I've got one there, so I work back
| | 02:35 |
and forth that way.
You can kind of see the pattern, so I'm
| | 02:39 |
stepping forward and back, and working on
different strokes on a particular frame.
| | 02:45 |
They may not all be in the same region,
but they will be within the same frame.
| | 02:51 |
So if I select say, one of these strokes
here we'll be able to come up here and
| | 02:55 |
see where does that stroke happen what's
over there by his knee.
| | 03:00 |
So I can look and I can see I've worked
all the way around him here.
| | 03:04 |
So that tells you where the stroke is in
that frame of time.
| | 03:07 |
And you know if it's something that's a
problem you can go in there and just
| | 03:11 |
delete the strokes you don't want.
Go back in, paint new strokes and you
| | 03:15 |
haven't lost anything.
Everything's all right there.
| | 03:20 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Complex Composites: Multiple KeysKeying both green and blue in a composite| 00:00 |
Sometimes we have a shot where we have to
actually sandwich our character in
| | 00:06 |
between two planes.
In this case, we've got Santa peeking
| | 00:11 |
around a door and he's actually making
contact with it.
| | 00:15 |
So we have to treat that surface
differently than we do our green screen background.
| | 00:20 |
Well, there's a couple different ways you
can do this.
| | 00:22 |
One is you could do a lot of Roto and
Masking.
| | 00:25 |
If you had a green plane and a green door
or a green background.
| | 00:30 |
Or if you don't want to keep your shadows
or drop shadows in there, then that
| | 00:35 |
wouldn't be an issue.
But if you do need to make contact with a
| | 00:40 |
surface, it's better to have a secondary
color.
| | 00:43 |
So in this case, we've got Santa is
peeking around a blue board, and he's got
| | 00:48 |
a green background.
So, this is a shot.
| | 00:53 |
It was actually a standard definition, so
we have some issues with, some noise in
| | 00:58 |
the shadows here.
Which are a little harder to control
| | 01:02 |
without doing a lot of Roto work or some
isolation to just treat the shadows.
| | 01:08 |
But just to show you a, a really rough
example of how we can obtain this.
| | 01:15 |
Well there's a process to this and it's
several steps.
| | 01:18 |
And I'm going to just cover the initial
steps of positioning and keying out Santa
| | 01:23 |
in this movie.
There'll be another movie in this chapter
| | 01:26 |
that deals with some of the more
intricacies of working with different
| | 01:30 |
layers and levels and everything.
To kind of bring our composite together.
| | 01:34 |
So let's get started with this.
It's in the chapter two folder.
| | 01:39 |
And I'm starting with the ready to matt
comp here.
| | 01:42 |
And the first thing I want to do is make
sure that I put everything into position.
| | 01:47 |
So, I want to get my door in position there
and that's fine right where it is there.
| | 01:54 |
I want to match my Santa with the door.
So I'm just going to bring him down in
| | 02:01 |
opacity a little bit so I can see the
door.
| | 02:04 |
And I need to move him over, so I'm going to
hit P for position, and just kind of move
| | 02:09 |
him over into position.
And then I'm going to have to rotate him
| | 02:15 |
ever so slightly, Rotate.
And I'm just going to try 1 degree.
| | 02:22 |
And that looks like that matches fairly
good there.
| | 02:25 |
Going to have to do a little bit of
positioning here.
| | 02:29 |
He gets cut off at the top there from his
head and then his shoulder here a little
| | 02:33 |
bit as he comes down into frame.
So I'm just going to, increase his scale
| | 02:40 |
ever so slightly.
We'll try 102%.
| | 02:43 |
I never liked upUNKNOWN anything that's
going to be green screen.
| | 02:49 |
But in this case, we kind of have to, 'cuz
it's, it's off kilter.
| | 02:53 |
So that get's us close.
And let's take a look at our positioning
| | 02:59 |
here again and see if we can line him up
just a little better here right in the
| | 03:03 |
middle, and see if we can get that.
There we go that's pretty close.
| | 03:08 |
Okay so now I'm going to take his
transparency back up to 100%.
| | 03:14 |
The first thing we gotta do is create a
Garbage matte.
| | 03:17 |
And the Garbage matte will allow us to
get rid of all of this junk on the right
| | 03:21 |
hand side here, and any noise or anything
out here.
| | 03:26 |
So come up here with the Pen tool, Ive
got that layer selected.
| | 03:29 |
And I'm just going to make a really rough
outline here to work with, and, bring
| | 03:35 |
this down just a little bit.
So, I need to make sure that I'm not
| | 03:41 |
getting too close, and I did here on, on
the left side so I'm going to pull this out.
| | 03:48 |
Can't get too close there and I'm also
going to be feathering the edges here some.
| | 03:53 |
To try to make sure we don't have
anything too sharp there, and still he's
| | 03:57 |
coming pretty close there for my comfort.
So I'm going to bring this out a little bit
| | 04:02 |
more here.
Look at his hands and the shadows, and I
| | 04:05 |
want to cut anything off on the right side.
That looks pretty good.
| | 04:10 |
So I'm going to come up here to my Mask, and
mask feather and I'm going to go about 50 pixels.
| | 04:18 |
And that gives me a nice Soft mat that's
a Garbage mat that I can work with.
| | 04:25 |
So now I'm going to apply key light.
I come down to my Keen and Key light and
| | 04:30 |
I'm going to grab my screen color.
Which I'm going for the green first.
| | 04:36 |
I'm going to concentrate on one at a time
come up here to my Screen matte mode and
| | 04:40 |
that way I can control my Screen matte
settings.
| | 04:45 |
I'm going to bring my clip white down just
so that I get rid of the ghosting.
| | 04:49 |
And everything that's going on in the
middle there.
| | 04:51 |
Got some noise in the background I want to
get rid of, so I'm going to bring the clip
| | 04:55 |
black up just a bit.
And I'll come down to my final result and
| | 04:59 |
see what I got to work with.
Looks like I've got a little bit of
| | 05:03 |
silliness here on the edges.
So, I'm just going to pull down the
| | 05:06 |
shrinkage just a bit to knock that down.
And soften that ever so slightly.
| | 05:14 |
We go to about 6 or 7, here we go.
And that's going to give us a really nice edge.
| | 05:21 |
Now we can turn on these other layers
here and see how well we're doing with
| | 05:25 |
the green screen part of it.
That's pretty clean, I'm happy with that.
| | 05:31 |
And now we're going to apply another
Passive key light on this.
| | 05:35 |
And we'll just come up here and go to
Effect key light and we're going to get
| | 05:40 |
rid of the blue.
Now this really only works if your
| | 05:44 |
character doesn't have any you know
predominant blue or green in it.
| | 05:49 |
Obviously otherwise you're gonns be
punching holes in it.
| | 05:52 |
So we're going to come up here and look
at our Screen matte.
| | 05:57 |
I'm not going to crank it quite as
aggressively as we did before just
| | 06:01 |
because I need the shadows of his hands
and his body to show up on the blue screen.
| | 06:07 |
But I do see there's a little bit of
ghosting out here so I do need to make
| | 06:10 |
sure that we're not going to have any
transparency in our Santa.
| | 06:15 |
So I'm going to pull this down just so that
disappears.
| | 06:18 |
And I'm probably going to do just a
little bit of softening here, and I'm
| | 06:21 |
also going to add a little screen pre-blur.
And this should hopefully help knock down
| | 06:27 |
some of the noise in the shadows, too.
So that's good enough for now.
| | 06:34 |
We'll take a look at that.
And see what we've got going on here.
| | 06:40 |
So we have to deal with a few issues
here.
| | 06:43 |
We got a little bit of blue showing up on
the edges here that I'd like to knock down.
| | 06:48 |
And also his hand gets a little bit
transparent there.
| | 06:52 |
That I want to work on that as well.
So, in our next movie, we'll get into how
| | 06:57 |
do we isolate some of these issues?
How do we knock these things down, how do
| | 07:03 |
we correct for those kinds of problems?
And then, of course, adjusting levels to
| | 07:09 |
try to bring them together.
| | 07:11 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Masking to isolate parts of an object to key| 00:02 |
'Kay, now that we've done our first pass
on our complex key, and complex meaning
| | 00:06 |
both blue and green in the same shot, to
create our sandwich here.
| | 00:12 |
We have a couple issues we need to deal
with.
| | 00:15 |
And one is, before Santa even appears,
we've got kind of this blue streak showing
| | 00:19 |
up here.
So, I'd like to matte that out, and also
| | 00:23 |
his hand goes a little bit transparent
here on the seam, and I want to try to
| | 00:28 |
address that.
So probably the best way to do that is,
| | 00:34 |
that element there, his hand, is a bit
seperate from the rest of his body.
| | 00:40 |
It's the first thing we see as he comes
around, so we do want that to show up first.
| | 00:45 |
So, probably the quickest way to do this
is to just duplicate this layer.
| | 00:50 |
So, I'm just going to do a Cmd + D, or, Ctrl
+ D on the PC.
| | 00:53 |
And I'm going to eliminate this mask
that's in here now.
| | 00:59 |
So, just go there and click that out.
And then I'm going to come out here.
| | 01:04 |
His hand doesn't really move other than
it just shows up, and then it stays there
| | 01:08 |
gripped to the door until he takes it
away.
| | 01:11 |
So, I want to find the space there, where
his hand is probably biggest.
| | 01:16 |
It comes down from the top, and it goes
about there, about eye level.
| | 01:20 |
So I'm going to just come to a spot
there, where I can draw a new mask.
| | 01:25 |
And I use the Pen tool, and I'm just
going to kind of make kind of a nice roundy mask
| | 01:31 |
here, around this area.
And make sure I don't get too close to
| | 01:37 |
the shadows.
And then just complete it.
| | 01:40 |
And I'm going to come up here to my Mask >
Feather.
| | 01:44 |
And I'll say about 15 pixels so that's
not harsh, and then I can also bring it
| | 01:49 |
down a little bit.
Now let's just to isolate this second
| | 01:54 |
layer here.
So that we're only really looking at that layer.
| | 01:59 |
And it's going kind of double up on our
shadow a bit here, so I might do just
| | 02:06 |
probably a little more blur on the blue
here.
| | 02:12 |
A little bit more blur, and I might come
into my screen matte here and bring this
| | 02:18 |
clip black up just little bit more.
Just so that it, it helps knock down some
| | 02:26 |
of the noise and isn't too strong in
there.
| | 02:31 |
And what that does is it allows us to get
rid of this blue streak down here, during
| | 02:37 |
this duration.
And the way we do that, is we have to
| | 02:42 |
kind of look and see okay when does the
hand first appear.
| | 02:46 |
It appears right about here.
So, I'm going to do this in a couple of
| | 02:49 |
different methods.
I'm going to adjust my transparency of
| | 02:53 |
both of these layers here.
And or the opacity, however you want to
| | 02:58 |
look at it.
So his hand starts right about here, I
| | 03:02 |
want it to be, this one to start right
there at 100%.
| | 03:08 |
And I want it to go back one frame.
And I'm going to select 0.
| | 03:15 |
That way I've got 0 opacity there.
Now I've got the rest of the Santa is
| | 03:20 |
coming in right about here.
That's his thumb, so right about here,
| | 03:26 |
see the ball from his hat showing up
right about there.
| | 03:30 |
So I'm going to click the stopwatch for 100%
there and then back one frame, and hit zero.
| | 03:39 |
And that gets rid of this, this noise in
there.
| | 03:42 |
So it all happens fairly quickly.
So if we just do a quick RAM preview here
| | 03:46 |
of just the first section, we can see
that it's hidden a little bit by all of
| | 03:50 |
this that's going on around us.
So let's just do a quick RAM preview.
| | 03:57 |
So it minimizes the amount of the
artifacts that show up in here, because
| | 04:02 |
it was low resolution.
And we can probably fade in this little
| | 04:07 |
bit right here a little more, so it
doesn't just pop up on screen all of a sudden.
| | 04:13 |
Helps to fade it in, so it's not so
noticeable.
| | 04:16 |
So those are a couple different tricks we
can try.
| | 04:19 |
The other thing we have to do here still
is to apply a level to him, a color level
| | 04:25 |
that's going to work.
So I come down here to my Color
| | 04:30 |
Correction and like to use Levels.
And we'll bring this out here a bit.
| | 04:35 |
So let's take a look at our Santa here.
He's got a little bit of this green
| | 04:39 |
casting on him here, and overall he's a
little bit too dark, a little too contrasting.
| | 04:45 |
So I'm going to brighten him up just a bit.
I'm going to enhance some of the red
| | 04:50 |
channel just a little bit.
I'll try not to go too red on his face here.
| | 04:56 |
There we go.
And then with the blue, I may brighten up
| | 04:58 |
the whites a little a bit.
I can bring this up just a bit, and that
| | 05:03 |
helps brighten up some of our whites and
takes some yellowy tinge out of him there.
| | 05:15 |
Again, it's a subjective amount that you
want to work with here.
| | 05:20 |
Just a little bit in the shadows here,
help knock some of that green out as well.
| | 05:24 |
So it's a subjective amount of levels
that you're going to apply to it, but
| | 05:28 |
that really does help sell the whole
thing.
| | 05:32 |
So if we do a RAM preview here, we'll be
able to see a little bit of our effect
| | 05:36 |
especially coming in the beginning there.
So, I've got one already done here.
| | 05:43 |
We've got our completed one.
And we can see how this works out
| | 05:46 |
together here.
You can go back in here, and reverse
| | 05:49 |
engineer anything that I've done in the
completed version.
| | 05:53 |
And you'll be able to see if your
settings match that as well.
| | 05:58 |
So that's using a sandwich of a complex
key, blue and green together all in the
| | 06:02 |
same shot.
And then isolating different parts of it,
| | 06:08 |
to get just the key that we want in the
areas that we really want to try to make
| | 06:14 |
the composite work.
| | 06:18 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using multiple layers and roto on a bad greenscreen shot| 00:00 |
Well sometimes you're given some green
screen footage from a client, that wasn't
| | 00:04 |
really shot well.
And that's actually going to happen a lot.
| | 00:09 |
So, you need to know what kind of steps
you could take, to try to correct it, but
| | 00:12 |
still try to get some kind of a composite
out of it.
| | 00:16 |
In this case, this was just a couple
frames from a shot on nationally
| | 00:21 |
recognized commercial, and a celebrity.
So, I just wanted to highlight the areas
| | 00:27 |
of issue here.
And she's moving quickly, there is some
| | 00:31 |
motion blur in here.
We have a horrible green screen back there.
| | 00:35 |
It wasn't even lit, it was just kind of
thrown up on a wall in the background.
| | 00:39 |
And it's a very soft shoot, so the
problem is, just using a straight process
| | 00:44 |
of just using Keylight or something, and
hoping to get a decent Key out of this,
| | 00:48 |
isn't going to be enough.
Because we're going to have to do so much
| | 00:55 |
to the Key, to try to get some of this
hair in here.
| | 00:59 |
Without giving her a total haircut, that
it's not going to make the foreground
| | 01:03 |
actually that usable.
So, we'll have to do this in a couple
| | 01:07 |
steps in a couple layers.
Well let's first, let's work on the Key itself.
| | 01:10 |
So, I've got this selected, come down
here to my Key and select Keylight.
| | 01:16 |
And I'll go ahead and grab this, and
Keylight does a pretty good job of
| | 01:21 |
pulling out that horrible color.
Let's look at our Screen Matte, though,
| | 01:26 |
to see what the whole story is.
And we've got all this noise and problems
| | 01:30 |
in here.
Let's scroll down the Screen Matte, and
| | 01:33 |
then I'll roll back the clip white.
And pull that back to a point where I'm
| | 01:38 |
right up to the edges here, and by doing
that I'm introducing more noise out here.
| | 01:43 |
So, I have to kind of pull that up, and
just enough to, not kill the hair in
| | 01:48 |
here, but to get rid of this noise.
And let's look at our final result here,
| | 01:55 |
I'm going to have to bring up the Screen
Softness, to about two.
| | 02:01 |
And maybe even a little bit of the Screen
Pre-blur, we'll go to about four.
| | 02:08 |
And see how that looks.
And that helps a bit.
| | 02:11 |
Now, I've just got this on my default
black background of my composition.
| | 02:16 |
And a lot of times, I go in there and I
can change my, my background color and my
| | 02:19 |
composition settings.
But sometimes I want to cycle through
| | 02:24 |
various colors, just to make sure that my
edges are still going to be visible,
| | 02:28 |
depending on what I'm composting against.
So, a real quick and easy way to do that
| | 02:33 |
is to create a new layer.
Get a Solid layer here, and I'll use this
| | 02:38 |
default white here, drag that down here
to the bottom.
| | 02:42 |
And that way, I can see over this
background color what I'm really working
| | 02:46 |
with here.
And if I want to cycle through and see
| | 02:50 |
what various colors might look like, I
just come up here to my Layer > Solid
| | 02:54 |
Settings, I click on the Color Swatch
here.
| | 02:58 |
And then I can in real time, cycle
through colors and see what problems I
| | 03:02 |
may be introducing, depending on the
background that's going to happen in there.
| | 03:08 |
You know, if I go into the darker colors,
we can see it starts looking a little
| | 03:11 |
muddier in there.
But this is just a real quick and easy
| | 03:14 |
way, to see what kind of backgrounds will
work with this composite.
| | 03:18 |
At the settings that we're working with,
and what we'll have to tweak a little more.
| | 03:23 |
I'm going to go ahead and cancel that,
and keep this off white color in here
| | 03:26 |
right now, and that kind of gives me an
idea of what I'm going to be working with.
| | 03:32 |
It's a little bit alias.
It's a little bit nasty in there.
| | 03:35 |
So, I'm going to blur that a bit, because
this is going to be my Background layer
| | 03:39 |
of the sandwich composite.
So, I'll come up here to my Effects and
| | 03:45 |
go to Blur and Sharpen and grab Camera
Lens Blur and apply that.
| | 03:50 |
Now I want to give it a little bit more.
So, I'll go to about ten.
| | 03:53 |
And we'll see how that looks.
Okay, and that's looking a lot better.
| | 03:58 |
At least as far as the hair, back here.
And that's really all I'm concentrating
| | 04:02 |
on, right now, is this hair back here.
And how it looks against my background.
| | 04:07 |
I want an idea of the hair there.
But I don't want it look real chunky or
| | 04:12 |
really exaggerated, so that's going to
work really well.
| | 04:16 |
Now of course this is actually blurred up
my foreground a lot, and I don't want
| | 04:20 |
that but what I'm going to do is just
duplicate this layer.
| | 04:26 |
And bring that up on top, going to get
rid of the Camera Lens Blur and the
| | 04:30 |
Keylight on that layer.
And now I'm going to create a really Soft
| | 04:35 |
Mask just inside this hairline.
So, that I can reintroduce, these subtle
| | 04:41 |
tones, all the right color correction and
everything for this, cuz that's another
| | 04:45 |
issue too you have to consider.
When you're doing a composite, and
| | 04:49 |
especially if you're doing a composite
for a client who gives you raw footage.
| | 04:54 |
This was shot on a red, so everything is
really flat.
| | 04:57 |
That hasn't been colorized.
They're going to colorize and post.
| | 05:00 |
And so, you're just creating an alpha for
them or creating a composite.
| | 05:04 |
You have to keep everything flat.
So, you can't introduce new colors,
| | 05:08 |
contrasts or anything like that.
So, you have to deliver just a nice
| | 05:12 |
sandwich back for them, so this has to
remain the same.
| | 05:15 |
So, this is why we will be making a Mask
here.
| | 05:18 |
So, I'm going to go down about 25%.
And I'm going to select my Pen tool, I'm
| | 05:24 |
on my frame zero here, and just going to
create a Mask here that will work just
| | 05:30 |
inside her hairline.
I've gotta see that I've got an issue
| | 05:36 |
here which will go to transparency I
don't want that in there at all.
| | 05:40 |
And then bring this down here, and just
create a really crude Mask here, cause
| | 05:47 |
then we're going to Feather this out a bit,
too.
| | 05:53 |
So, what I want to do now is Feather this
mask, so I just come down here, troll
| | 05:59 |
down my Mask and come to Mask Feather,
put in 50.
| | 06:05 |
And if we want to see what that looks
like let's hide the layer below it.
| | 06:08 |
It gives us a nice soft edge there on our
mask, so that'll work just fine.
| | 06:13 |
Now, the thing with doing a Roto on just
this foreground, is, we don't have to be
| | 06:18 |
real exact.
We just want to try to make sure that we
| | 06:22 |
see all of this skin detail in here.
And elements this motion blur, so that it
| | 06:26 |
really isn't affected much at all.
But we do need to follow this a long time.
| | 06:31 |
We only have two frames here, so it
shouldn't be too difficult.
| | 06:33 |
We go to the next frame.
And we'll see that her head's moved to
| | 06:37 |
the right, so we need to move all of our
elements to the right and I'm just going
| | 06:40 |
to select some of these points.
Move them over.
| | 06:45 |
There's some green showing through, here
so this one has to move over as well.
| | 06:50 |
And then of course we've gotta move these
over considerably cause her head's tilted
| | 06:54 |
as well.
So, now I can see what I've got to work
| | 06:59 |
with there.
And click off the mask, so I can see what
| | 07:03 |
it's going to look like between frame
zero and one.
| | 07:08 |
And it's a very slight tinge of green
through here.
| | 07:12 |
May not be an issue, depending on what
happens to the frame after that.
| | 07:17 |
So, I may consider moving these in, if
that was the case.
| | 07:20 |
But one thing I am noticing is, the,
Camera Lens Blur that I applied to this
| | 07:24 |
Background layer, has actually introduced
pixels along the edge here that I don't want.
| | 07:32 |
Something to remember to click on, is in
here, there's a button here, repeat edge pixels.
| | 07:38 |
So, we're going to click that.
That will eliminate that, problem from
| | 07:43 |
showing up there.
So, we want to make sure that that's
| | 07:46 |
taken care of on that background layer.
Then this front layer here.
| | 07:51 |
We've got the mask going on in here.
And we haven't introduced any other
| | 07:55 |
problems here.
So, that pretty much takes care of, that,
| | 07:58 |
now if we want to be able to see, what
this looks like compared to the original.
| | 08:04 |
Well we can just duplicate this, original
layer here again, and then we can turn
| | 08:08 |
off our Keylight, and turn off the Camera
Lens Blur.
| | 08:13 |
And to be able to see before and after.
Now we do have kind of an issue here.
| | 08:18 |
There's this dark edge here that shows up
in the original.
| | 08:22 |
And once we've blurred that, that's kind
of, that's not really there in the original.
| | 08:30 |
But that shouldn't be an issue once
everything's moving.
| | 08:33 |
Because it kind of moves and changes and
shifts there.
| | 08:36 |
But it would be worse if it was the other
way around, because then we'd be losing
| | 08:39 |
hair and losing an edge here.
So, I think in this case, this is a good
| | 08:43 |
process to go through and really use the
layers to your advantage to, be able to
| | 08:49 |
make this sandwiched composite of sorts.
And still keeping the integrity of the
| | 08:57 |
original image to give back to your
client.
| | 09:02 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Motion Tracking and Match-MovingMotion tracking with After Effects| 00:02 |
Now in this chapter, I'm going to cover
several different things, which why I've
| | 00:06 |
got several different components in this
project, that I'm going to be introducing
| | 00:10 |
to you.
That will cover various different parts
| | 00:15 |
of this composition process.
And we're going to be starting with
| | 00:18 |
tracking, the build in motion trackers.
That are built in to After Effects, and
| | 00:24 |
I've got this footage.
It was provided to us by Hollywood Camera
| | 00:28 |
Works, Per Holmes, and he's got some
clips you can go and download there.
| | 00:34 |
Green screen clips to use for training
and tutorials.
| | 00:37 |
Well the one problem with this clip, and
he even pointed itLAUGH out, was that
| | 00:42 |
when he put the green screen outside the
window.
| | 00:46 |
He put it too close to the window, as far
as the tracker points are concerned.
| | 00:52 |
The green screen's fine, could probably
use a little more light, but other then
| | 00:56 |
that, the problem with the tracker points
is that they're too close to the window.
| | 01:02 |
So, if you put anything out there other
then maybe like a brick wall, that's
| | 01:05 |
supposed be right outside the window.
It's going to look fake.
| | 01:08 |
It's not going to move well.
As you can see here, it almost follows
| | 01:12 |
the reflection of the tree in here.
So, that's how close the paper is where
| | 01:18 |
the screen is to the window.
So, we have to eliminate those tracker points.
| | 01:25 |
There too bright.
They're going to show up.
| | 01:26 |
We can't really Key them out easily
without them showing.
| | 01:30 |
The reflections will mostly go away.
Except for these bright ones here.
| | 01:34 |
From other windows, but that's okay.
We want some reflections to give it
| | 01:38 |
believability in here.
So, in this movie, I'm going to focus on
| | 01:42 |
primarily the tracking, the motion
tracking.
| | 01:47 |
And I'm going to use the built-in
tracker.
| | 01:49 |
Now what I've done is, I've created some
patches here.
| | 01:53 |
You'll be able to follow along, just open
up the chapter three folder, and you'll
| | 01:57 |
find this project in there.
So, you'll be able to follow along with
| | 02:01 |
all of these.
Now I'm going to just turn these on, so
| | 02:03 |
they're visible, and you can see they're
all different layers.
| | 02:07 |
They're Solid layers that I've created a
little mask around and a little Feathered
| | 02:11 |
Mask around each one.
Well, the problem is this, they have to
| | 02:16 |
follow along the patch in the movie.
So, I could manually do that, and try to
| | 02:20 |
match move them, but it's so much quicker
to just apply a tracking source to them.
| | 02:25 |
So, I'm going to select the actual video
file.
| | 02:29 |
It's a Image Stack, which is what they
use a lot in.
| | 02:32 |
Hollywood film making.
So, we'll double-click that and open it
| | 02:36 |
up and now we've got that active so, I
can see my patches here.
| | 02:42 |
So, I'm going to make sure that I'm back
on frame zero, and I'll open up my
| | 02:46 |
Tracker panel here.
I'll click on Track Motion and the only
| | 02:50 |
thing I really need to follow, is the
motion for here.
| | 02:54 |
I'm not concerned about rotation, or
scale or anything, cuz I'm going to have
| | 02:58 |
just one track point for each patch.
So, what I will do is get this opened up
| | 03:03 |
a little bit, center it over the patch
over the piece of tape here, and that we
| | 03:08 |
will be able to follow this.
Track it.
| | 03:14 |
And just align that a bit, open this up
a little bit so it looks at the range.
| | 03:20 |
And then I come over here to the Analyze
button and click the Analyze Forward, and
| | 03:24 |
it will go through the footage.
Click here and it will find all of the
| | 03:30 |
edges and it will track that.
One little piece of tape there.
| | 03:38 |
And there we go.
Okay, now it looks like because the
| | 03:44 |
camera was dolling in.
It got a little bigger.
| | 03:50 |
So, we might want to play the scale, if we
have to, for the actual Patch layer.
| | 03:56 |
But I'm not too worried about that right
now.
| | 03:58 |
It's just a patch.
So, let's actually edit our target.
| | 04:01 |
We want this to go to our first layer.
So, we'll go to Edit target.
| | 04:08 |
And that will bring up this.
And we want to make sure that it is on the
| | 04:12 |
line green solid one.
Click OK, and then apply.
| | 04:17 |
Now it's going to ask us x and y
dimensions and we say yes and here's our
| | 04:22 |
tracker, and here's the first layer here.
Now.
| | 04:28 |
One thing that happens when you're
tracking, sometimes the anchor point of
| | 04:32 |
the layer isn't quite centered, so it
throws everything off.
| | 04:37 |
So, if we're looking here in our
composite.
| | 04:39 |
It may not look like it's really centered
on there.
| | 04:42 |
Although that's a real easy fix, we just
select the layer in the timeline, click
| | 04:47 |
A, for anchor point, and we can make a
quick little adjustment to the numbers here.
| | 04:54 |
Position that in.
And that looks like it does a fairly
| | 04:58 |
clean job of it.
Click off it, and we can probably go up
| | 05:02 |
just a little more.
And the reason why we are patching these
| | 05:07 |
up, is so they don't show when we do our
actual composite.
| | 05:11 |
We want them to kind of go invisible.
So, we want the reflections to show, we
| | 05:16 |
want all the lights and everything.
So, we want it to be a believable scene,
| | 05:20 |
but we don't want these things to show.
And we're not going to use them.
| | 05:23 |
They're not usable.
So, we're doing several things here.
| | 05:26 |
We're tracking some things.
We're patching up holes.
| | 05:29 |
We're cleaning up our plate, which is
almost like doing a garbage matte on a
| | 05:32 |
green screen.
But just kind of a little reverse.
| | 05:36 |
So, I'm going to repeat this process for
the other three layers, and each time you
| | 05:42 |
do that, you open up your actual video
Source window.
| | 05:49 |
Click Track Motion, and it will create a
new tracker.
| | 05:52 |
You can see tracker two.
Position, and then I do the exact same
| | 05:56 |
thing, but just on the next patch.
And I'll repeat this for each layer that
| | 06:02 |
I need to track this for.
And then the same thing.
| | 06:06 |
I will make sure that I'm at zero, and I
will Analyze Forward.
| | 06:16 |
Looks like it captured well.
Then Edit Target, make sure that I've got
| | 06:23 |
the right layer selected, which I'm going
for layer two.
| | 06:27 |
Otherwise, it will overwrite my other
data or conflict with it.
| | 06:31 |
And then hit Apply, and OK.
And we should be good to go here.
| | 06:38 |
We've got two of the patches done here.
And again, I need to move my anchor point
| | 06:41 |
for my second one.
So, A for Anchor.
| | 06:46 |
Move that up.
And then over, and there we go.
| | 06:53 |
So, I'll just repeat this with the other
two, and we'll move on to the next movie.
| | 07:01 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Basics of match-moving| 00:02 |
Okay, now we have our patches all tracked
in there.
| | 00:05 |
And you can see they patch up the tape
holes pretty well.
| | 00:08 |
They're not perfect, but it's good enough
that we can pull a decent Key and not
| | 00:11 |
have them distract from it.
So, I've already done that for you in the comp.
| | 00:16 |
It's the Christmas Window Home comp, you
can open that up.
| | 00:20 |
And you can turn on the Keylight, which
reveals our background.
| | 00:24 |
And you see our background plate is just
a static JPEG here.
| | 00:29 |
And in this case, he's going to be the
focus, our snowman.
| | 00:33 |
He's going to be the star of the show.
So, I want my foreground to match my
| | 00:37 |
background, which is that warm,
incandescent Christmas lights.
| | 00:42 |
So, I've already applied some levels
here.
| | 00:45 |
And you can go in there and see exactly
which settings I've made on the different
| | 00:49 |
channels to closely match this.
So, now my lighting of my foreground
| | 00:54 |
plate matches.
We just have to match our motion.
| | 00:59 |
Now, I'm going to track part of the
foreground, just to match my background
| | 01:04 |
to the foreground as far as camera motion
is concerned.
| | 01:09 |
And what we'll do is then we have to
physically match move, and that is a
| | 01:14 |
process of actually moving our anchor
points.
| | 01:19 |
So, that we actually have a believable
emotion with the camera.
| | 01:25 |
And that's all very subjective.
And you're going to see, that process takes
| | 01:28 |
a little bit of time.
But first let's get our tracking going here.
| | 01:31 |
I've got my foreground selected, and
instead of double-clicking it which only
| | 01:36 |
opens up this other comp we've done here.
I've just got, selected once and I come
| | 01:42 |
over here to my Tracker window and hit
Track Motion.
| | 01:46 |
And now it opens it up here for us to
find a track point, and I'm going to just
| | 01:50 |
move this up here to this little piece of
the chandelier here.
| | 01:56 |
And center that in there cuz I need some
contrasting spot there, and make sure
| | 02:00 |
that I'm at frame zero here and then hit
my Analyze Forward.
| | 02:05 |
Then we'll come back and finish the
track.
| | 02:09 |
Okay, so we can see the difference of the
motion in here, and it's not a real
| | 02:15 |
smooth curve, even though the dolly looks
pretty smooth.
| | 02:23 |
We do have some motion here of the camera
tilting and moving on the dolly.
| | 02:30 |
So, that's really important to note that,
because when we apply that to our
| | 02:33 |
background, we'll see that it does kind
of tie the two together, at least as far
| | 02:36 |
as that's concerned.
So, after edit our target and we want to
| | 02:42 |
select our background here, which is this
JPEG and click OK, and then apply x and y
| | 02:48 |
and now we're back to our comp here.
We can see that the tracker has put some
| | 02:56 |
points in here, and we can click that
off.
| | 03:01 |
And then we can look and see what it did
to our background here, if we twirl down
| | 03:04 |
our Transform.
We've got a Key frame on every single
| | 03:08 |
frame of this which is our tracking
position.
| | 03:13 |
Let's take a look at the motion.
And even though the camera motion looks
| | 03:18 |
like it's moving our background okay.
We still don't feel it's that believable
| | 03:23 |
because it's not really changing in its
scale or in proportion to the window.
| | 03:29 |
The background is just staying too
static, and we need it to kind of move up
| | 03:33 |
and over in frame so that it feels.
And that's where we have to do this
| | 03:39 |
subjective match moving.
Well, the first thing we need to do is
| | 03:43 |
find out at what point does it start
making most of the moves.
| | 03:47 |
So, I use the scrubber here after I've
done a RAM preview, so I can kind of see
| | 03:50 |
that easily.
And it looks like it kind of takes off
| | 03:55 |
here, starts taking off here.
So, I know I'm going to have to make some
| | 04:00 |
motion somewhere in here, and so I'm
going to make a little marker here.
| | 04:05 |
Let's click marker, and drag it over.
And then, somewhere over in here, it
| | 04:10 |
starts to slow down.
It doesn't really slow down entirely till
| | 04:14 |
the end.
But it does most of its move before it
| | 04:17 |
eases in here toward the end.
So, somewhere in here.
| | 04:21 |
I"ll probably stop more of the actual
match moving, so I'll move that here and
| | 04:27 |
then just let the tracker take it from
that point.
| | 04:33 |
So, the match moves I want to make on this
layer.
| | 04:37 |
Will be, actually it's position, but I'm
not going to change position because my
| | 04:40 |
position is already used up with all my
track points.
| | 04:44 |
What I can change is my scale and my
anchor point.
| | 04:47 |
So, my anchor point is the point where if
you just click and drag that, you see
| | 04:51 |
that it moves it around in there.
The anchor point is the actually
| | 04:57 |
centering of your frame.
So, I'm going to undo that, of course.
| | 05:02 |
I will click my stopwatch for anchor
point and in scale, because I'm going to
| | 05:06 |
leave it at that as the starting point.
And then when I come down here, I kind of
| | 05:13 |
note that, well, the camera is moving
this way and is kind of zooming in a bit.
| | 05:20 |
It's coming in on the background.
And it's kind of moving up in frame.
| | 05:26 |
And if we were to really look out there,
the, the snowman would move off to our left.
| | 05:31 |
So, I'm going to just generalize a position,
at this point.
| | 05:36 |
And I'm going to bring up the scale, a
little bit.
| | 05:40 |
Then I want to make the x settings on the
anchor point, I want to move those to the
| | 05:46 |
right, to push the layer to the left
some.
| | 05:51 |
And then I'm going to take the y settings
and move those up, so it comes up in
| | 05:55 |
frame just a little bit.
And that's just a first step
| | 06:00 |
generalization, for making my match move.
So, I can take a look here and see how
| | 06:05 |
much am I moving it, too much in one
direction?
| | 06:08 |
Am I not making it smooth enough?
And one thing I'm going to do is actually
| | 06:14 |
do an ease out of this setting here.
So I right-click on both of those Key
| | 06:19 |
Frames, Key Frame Assistant, Easy Ease
Out, that will make that a much smoother
| | 06:23 |
transition, so it doesn't just take off.
And then here I will ease in, so I'll
| | 06:30 |
select both of those.
Right-click and Easy Ease In.
| | 06:36 |
So, that means it won't just have a giant
stop either.
| | 06:39 |
So, now I can kind of scrub through, see
how this works, and if its close enough.
| | 06:46 |
So, I just have to kind of go back and
forth.
| | 06:48 |
And tweak this a bit.
Maybe scale this a bit.
| | 06:52 |
And play with it a bit.
And try to get that matched in there, so
| | 06:57 |
that it looks good.
And this, takes a little bit of time to
| | 07:02 |
do this, especially when you have kind of
a start and a stop point.
| | 07:07 |
We don't have key points along the way to
really check in on.
| | 07:11 |
So, we just have to kind of guess, okay,
where's the camera pointing?
| | 07:14 |
What is it focusing on?
And then we move from there.
| | 07:17 |
Then in our next movie we'll take this to
the next step and we'll start adding in
| | 07:22 |
some other believable elements, such as
some snow and things to really kind of
| | 07:26 |
pull this together.
But in the meantime, go ahead and play
| | 07:32 |
with this, and see if you can move your
background anchor points and your scale,
| | 07:36 |
to kind of match what you feel this
should be.
| | 07:41 |
And then, if you have to, go to the
completed one.
| | 07:43 |
And kind of look and see what was done
with the final.
| | 07:48 |
And see how close you are in your
guesstimation of those.
| | 07:52 |
And we'll come back to the next movie.
| | 07:57 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Match-moving with depth and scale| 00:02 |
Okay, so I've settled on my match moves
for this shot.
| | 00:05 |
And I ended up moving my end down
further past this, point that I initially selected.
| | 00:13 |
Just because it was just, not working for
me.
| | 00:16 |
So, I moved it down a little further, and
you can see that it's very subtle.
| | 00:21 |
The camera does still keep moving even
after the background looks like it's
| | 00:25 |
done, but that's just because it's making
a very subtle pan in.
| | 00:30 |
And when we're done here, we're going to
have different layers and we're actually
| | 00:34 |
going to create some depth of field in
our final movie.
| | 00:38 |
But at this point, I'm pretty happy with
my suggested moves.
| | 00:41 |
And you'll be able to go to the completed
one and see, what the actual numbers are,
| | 00:45 |
and compare them to what you ended up
with.
| | 00:49 |
And you may be happier with the moves
that you ended up making, it's a very
| | 00:51 |
subjective process.
Match moving is all about the eye, and no
| | 00:55 |
two people are going to do the exact same
match moves.
| | 00:59 |
Cuz it's not a mathematical process, it's
all very much a visual process.
| | 01:03 |
So, with that being said, I've got my
background is done, the foreground is complete.
| | 01:11 |
Now, you'll see there's a couple black
solid layers in here, well one is
| | 01:16 |
primarily just a mask that I've created.
And the mask is for a particle generator
| | 01:23 |
for snow.
And I created this very soft edge mask
| | 01:27 |
here to block out the Snow layer, the
particle generation that I've done here.
| | 01:34 |
And if we look up here, we'll see that I
have used the CC Snow effect which comes
| | 01:40 |
with After Effects CS5.
And you can you know, play with the
| | 01:45 |
different settings.
I have come up with this particular
| | 01:49 |
amount which reads really well for me.
I'm really happy with the amount of snow
| | 01:54 |
as it's coming down.
And I've also motion tracked the Snow
| | 01:58 |
layer as well.
So you can see the transform I've already
| | 02:02 |
done in Motion Track.
And I've applied the same anchor point
| | 02:06 |
and scale settings that I did on the
snowman.
| | 02:10 |
Because I wanted to make sure that it
moved in the same amount, and looked believable.
| | 02:16 |
I didn't want anything looking like it
was slipping and sliding.
| | 02:20 |
So, basically, I took the same key frames
for my background.
| | 02:25 |
Because the Snow layer is going to be
kind of consistent with the motion of the
| | 02:29 |
background outside.
And I just copied and pasted them in here.
| | 02:33 |
I didn't have to create a new motion
track and do all of that.
| | 02:36 |
I just copied and pasted what I was happy
with, with my background.
| | 02:41 |
Well the problem was, for me, seeing that
if all of the snow was bright and white,
| | 02:45 |
even clear out here in the top in the, on
the back.
| | 02:50 |
It didn't seem like it was really being
lit, by the artificial lighting from the
| | 02:55 |
tree or from the inside.
And of course at this point it still
| | 02:59 |
doesn't, so I created this mask which
eliminates some of the snow.
| | 03:04 |
It's a very soft mask which is several
hundred, yeah, it's 500 pixels of
| | 03:09 |
feathering, which gives it this great big
gradation here.
| | 03:15 |
And that's a solid black layer here.
And so we'll close that out.
| | 03:20 |
This layer is using the Track Matte
method.
| | 03:23 |
Which I've got Layer > Track Matte and
that's Alpha matte on that black mask.
| | 03:30 |
So what, you have to have a solid layer
to apply your snow to.
| | 03:33 |
So that's why I've done that, and then
I've come up here with my hue saturation,
| | 03:38 |
and I've given it some coloring.
I've given it this colorization to give
| | 03:44 |
it kind of this yellow cast of light
here.
| | 03:48 |
And that way it looks like it's actually
snow that's been illuminated by the fake light.
| | 03:55 |
And then of course, I've added some lens
blur to it, and that is changed over time.
| | 04:02 |
If I look down here to my Effects, and
look at my Lens Blur.
| | 04:06 |
I can see that I've changed my i-, the
iris of the blur over time, and that's
| | 04:11 |
what we're going to get in next.
When we talk about the whole depth of
| | 04:16 |
field and how that changes when the
camera changes, and that changes our
| | 04:21 |
focus as well.
But you can see as it begins it looks a
| | 04:26 |
little more realistic as it's off, and
you can again apply this overtime in a
| | 04:31 |
subjective manner.
We'll get into that into the next movie,
| | 04:37 |
of how to create that real, tie-in, of
the depth of field, when you're moving
| | 04:42 |
the camera, and you're changing your
focus.
| | 04:47 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a simulated depth-of-field effect| 00:02 |
Now that we have our composite completed,
with all of our, motion tracking and our,
| | 00:07 |
match moving, and the particle generator,
layer, added in, and that's also, copied,
| | 00:13 |
and, tracked, I want to show you how to
make this even another level of
| | 00:17 |
believability in the composite, and that
is especially important when you have
| | 00:23 |
either a zoom in or a camera in motion,
and that is changing our depth of field
| | 00:28 |
and changing our focus.
So in this shot here we're actually
| | 00:38 |
moving the camera to look at the candles
and then out the window.
| | 00:44 |
So, to make this shot more believable,
and put our focus on the snowman and the
| | 00:49 |
tree with the Christmas lights on out
there, I'm changing the focus from our
| | 00:53 |
foreground plate to our background plate
over time.
| | 00:58 |
And that's a very simple process of just
using the camera lens blur and if I break
| | 01:03 |
this down I can show you that I'm doing
it all at the same time.
| | 01:09 |
We can open up this Christmas window home
completed.
| | 01:13 |
And you can look at the effects here and
the lens blur of the top layer, the
| | 01:17 |
foreground layer.
You can see that I've got some points here.
| | 01:24 |
It's where the camera is making most of
the move toward the end.
| | 01:29 |
And that felt like it was about the right
place to do it.
| | 01:32 |
So that's when I started to change the
focus as it's moving in, and, and panning
| | 01:37 |
to the right a little bit.
Now, I've changed the iris radius of my
| | 01:42 |
foreground plate, so that it's totally in
focus up to this point.
| | 01:47 |
And I've set the key frame.
I have to use the stopwatch here and I've
| | 01:51 |
set my first key frame to measure at
zero.
| | 01:55 |
That means it's totally in focus and then
out here at about six seconds, I've taken
| | 02:00 |
it up to 15 and, did an ease in and an
ease out on those.
| | 02:06 |
And you can see that it goes over time.
Now I've matched those in contrast to the
| | 02:10 |
layers underneath.
Now if we twirl down the solid layer here
| | 02:15 |
and we look at the lens blur for that,
I'm doing just the opposite.
| | 02:23 |
I'm going from 15 down to about seven,
because if I go to zero there, we would
| | 02:27 |
be focusing on the snowflakes, and I
wanted them, since they're in motion, to
| | 02:32 |
have still a little bit of blur and keep
them soft, at this point.
| | 02:39 |
And then, if we look at our background
plate entirely, then we can see that we
| | 02:43 |
do go down to zero there because we do
want to bring the snowman and the lights
| | 02:47 |
in focus there.
Since the snowflakes are in between and
| | 02:53 |
they are moving, we want them to stay a
little bit blurrier.
| | 02:59 |
So, we play this back and we look and see
that that pull of the rack focus as the
| | 03:04 |
camera's moving in, really sells the
believablity of this composite a lot more
| | 03:10 |
definitely, than just the elements
themselves.
| | 03:17 |
So, take into consideration what you're
trying to achieve when you are making
| | 03:21 |
your composite.
And especially if there's camera moves,
| | 03:25 |
if there's pans, if there's zooms.
Consider if you have the ability to pull
| | 03:30 |
out your layers like we have here of
using a little bit of a depth of focus
| | 03:36 |
adjustment in there to really sell that
believability between the two.
| | 03:45 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using mocha for AE to track and insert objects| 00:02 |
I'm going to show you how to use Mocha for AE
with After Effects to do motion tracking,
| | 00:08 |
and replace an object on another moving
object.
| | 00:14 |
I've got this video footage here, that is
this truck driving by here, an SUV and
| | 00:19 |
it's got a license plate on there.
And I want to replace that license plate
| | 00:25 |
with one that I've made in Photoshop.
So I've got one here, I did this
| | 00:30 |
obviously for Adobe MAX a couple years
ago.
| | 00:34 |
And this is kind of a fun project, but it
really explains the process well.
| | 00:40 |
And right now, I've got it scaled up at
100% which is what we want for that layer.
| | 00:47 |
That's what the whole thing looks like.
But you want to make sure that you're
| | 00:51 |
insert layer is at 100%, and that it's at
least as large or larger than the visible
| | 00:56 |
space in your comp.
And the reason is that were using Corner
| | 01:02 |
Pinning in Mocha AE, which will then size
and scale it down to where we want it.
| | 01:09 |
The process is fairly straightforward.
I just have a comp here and you can open
| | 01:14 |
up this comp as well for the Mocha
license plate tracker.
| | 01:20 |
And I've just got my Footage layer and
I've got my license plate layer on top
| | 01:24 |
and I've just set this at frame 0.
And I'm going to go to Mocha AE, and this
| | 01:30 |
is where I actually do the tracking.
And I start by selecting the actual
| | 01:36 |
license plate movie, which is the MOV
file and it will determine everything
| | 01:42 |
that's in the files.
I just click OK and there we go.
| | 01:52 |
And now, I see that it's squished a
little bit.
| | 01:55 |
I know this is a wider track, so I'm
going to come over here to Clip.
| | 02:00 |
The Clip tab down here.
And I'm going to select, we'll, try this,
| | 02:05 |
a D-1 Anamorphic.
There we go.
| | 02:09 |
And then, I can select the Hand tool
here, make sure that we're in the frame.
| | 02:14 |
Now, the first thing I want to do is
actually create a track on this, so I'm
| | 02:19 |
going to come here to the Spline, create
a Spline and click just around,
| | 02:23 |
generally, around the license plate.
So, it's going to look for the most
| | 02:30 |
contrasting data to follow, and we just
really wanted to watch this license
| | 02:34 |
plate, and this isn't really selecting
what our Corner Pin are.
| | 02:40 |
This is just to track that actual data.
So I've got this starts at frame 0 and I
| | 02:46 |
come down here to my Track Forward
button, and I click that, and I watch it
| | 02:51 |
go onto Track.
And it's going to look at all the pixels
| | 02:57 |
within that range, and it's going to
follow them and track them all the way
| | 03:00 |
through till the license place actually
disappears off frame.
| | 03:05 |
And then it will give us an error out
saying there's nothing left to, to track.
| | 03:10 |
That's okay, because by then, the,
everything's going to be off screen, it
| | 03:13 |
won't matter.
So, we can scrub through here and look
| | 03:17 |
and see how our track is.
And we can also play it through the
| | 03:22 |
Playback button there.
You see it does a really fine job of
| | 03:26 |
tracking that license plate.
So, let's go back to our beginning here
| | 03:31 |
and we're going to turn on our surface.
And it's going to kind of create this
| | 03:38 |
little box within here.
Now, one thing we'll notice is, if we
| | 03:44 |
grab a corner, we can see that up here,
up in this area, we'll see a zoomed in
| | 03:49 |
preview of it.
So what I want to do is since I know I've
| | 03:54 |
got a little bit of a frame around the
license plate, I want to come out just
| | 03:58 |
outside the corner there, and I'll do
this on all four corners.
| | 04:03 |
Accommodate for a little bit of the black
frame.
| | 04:07 |
And grab that on all four corners and
just try to get as close as I can to what
| | 04:12 |
I think will work well for my piece.
This is where you have to be fairly
| | 04:19 |
precise, because this is what's going to
determine your Corner Pinning.
| | 04:26 |
So sometimes, it helps to zoom in a
little bit here with the Zoom tool, zoom
| | 04:31 |
in and then back to my selector here.
And so this is a little bit subjective.
| | 04:39 |
You can determine how much of the area
you want to cover.
| | 04:44 |
But you do want to make sure that it looked
right, the perspective is right and the
| | 04:47 |
frame is good on here.
So, you can pull this up just a little
| | 04:51 |
bit more.
And we're pretty good there.
| | 04:57 |
So now, we can zoom back out and play
forward.
| | 05:04 |
Let it preview there.
We can see how far it goes there.
| | 05:11 |
Scrub across, and we see, there, it's,
it's off by there anyways, so we don't
| | 05:14 |
really care what data it does there.
So, that looks pretty good and I'm just
| | 05:18 |
going to come down here to Export
Tracking Data click that, and I'm going
| | 05:22 |
to copy to clipboard.
And then, I can come back to AE, make
| | 05:28 |
sure I've got my License Plate layers
selected, make sure that I'm at frame 0.
| | 05:35 |
And then, I just do a Command+V or Ctrl+V
if you're on a PC and there is my license plate.
| | 05:44 |
It's floating up here a little bit,
because we have to adjust our anchor point.
| | 05:48 |
So I select this layer, click A for
anchor point, and then I can script
| | 05:52 |
through my numbers here till I line it up
with the other plate.
| | 05:58 |
So it covers it up, there we go.
And there's our license plate on our SUV.
| | 06:09 |
Now, to give this just a little bit more
believability, I do have Motion Blur on
| | 06:12 |
that channel.
So it does some motion blurring, but
| | 06:16 |
still a little bit strong so, I'll
probably just add a little Gaussian blur
| | 06:21 |
to it and say maybe two.
Two pixels, that way, it matches a little
| | 06:28 |
more of the, details and the focus on the
SUV itself.
| | 06:34 |
So, that's a real quick two or three
steps there to, to create a really solid
| | 06:39 |
motion track replacing something on a
moving object and using the layer in
| | 06:43 |
AfterEffects, using M ocha 4AE and
AfterEffects.
| | 06:50 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Matte Painting and Moving Background/Foreground PlatesThe HBO production of "John Adams"| 00:05 |
Typically, we come in after everything's
been shot on productions like this.
| | 00:11 |
This was a long production for HBO itself
I think, I think that by the time we got
| | 00:16 |
on board they had been shooting for over
a year.
| | 00:22 |
and then we added another probably seven
months or eight months to the, to that
| | 00:27 |
schedule with our post work.
but we were the primary house on it.
| | 00:32 |
And we just, we just sort of get the, get
the plates in and, and start working.
| | 00:39 |
As far as creativity is concerned, your
always working hand and hand with the supervisor.
| | 00:43 |
And and they've always got their ideas
of what it should look like.
| | 00:47 |
In this case reality was the tune,
reality was what we were suppose to do.
| | 00:51 |
and I guess and they trusted us a lot to
sort of look at the reference on that.
| | 00:56 |
When one scene in particular for instance
takes place in Boston Harbor.
| | 01:01 |
And Boston Harbor 300 years later looks
very different than Boston Harbor in the
| | 01:05 |
late 1700s.
Where, most of, I'd say about 70% of
| | 01:09 |
Boston's been land filled in.
so we got old maps out, from Boston, and,
| | 01:15 |
did geometric projections and built
geometry based off of those old maps.
| | 01:22 |
and production really liked that sort of
attention to detail I think.
| | 01:27 |
>> The greenscreen shots I think the
biggest challenges that we ran into were
| | 01:30 |
some of the stuff that they shot for the
Boston Harbor sequence.
| | 01:35 |
they had some some interesting setups
there.
| | 01:40 |
Where there was camera moves that were
moving through like fishing nets and, and
| | 01:46 |
things like that.
That were actually very, very
| | 01:51 |
challenging, me, you know, it not only
were they you know, shots with green
| | 01:55 |
screen through fishing nets.
but the camera was moving as well, so
| | 02:00 |
they were doing a dolly.
pushing along with the actors and, you're
| | 02:04 |
supposed to see the, harbor behind them
through the fishing net at it goes by.
| | 02:09 |
So, those kind of, those kind of
situations are probably the most
| | 02:13 |
challenging, to, to get good keys, on, on
that stuff.
| | 02:18 |
Yeah, they just throw stuff up.
It's not lit properly.
| | 02:20 |
And it's just, there's this assumption
that, you know, it's done on a computer.
| | 02:24 |
And you can just push a button and make
it all go away.
| | 02:27 |
And it's so not that, you know.
And thing that is a little frustrating
| | 02:31 |
for me as an artist is, because there was
so little time spent on the set
| | 02:35 |
addressing those issues.
it means we have to spend more time on
| | 02:41 |
our back end trying to just fix the moot,
the rudimentary things, just trying to
| | 02:45 |
get a good key.
you can spend a lot of time trying to do that.
| | 02:51 |
And so that's time that could have been
spent elsewhere to, to make other things
| | 02:56 |
nicer and better.
And and you know, it's just like you
| | 03:00 |
know, the client's only helping
themselves if they give us a green screen
| | 03:04 |
that's good.
Because that you know, or you know, they
| | 03:09 |
shoot things properly.
Because then we can, you know, we can
| | 03:13 |
spend more time on the little things.
And the little things are what really,
| | 03:18 |
you know, bring it to life.
And if you're just trying to, you, you
| | 03:21 |
know, never have enough time.
And if you're just trying to get over
| | 03:24 |
the, make the most rudimentary things
like keys ,and, and things like that work.
| | 03:29 |
It's just so much time spent on that,
where it could be spent on the little
| | 03:33 |
stuff to make things nice.
>> Well, it seems every show these days
| | 03:38 |
gets more and more difficult from a from
a production standpoint.
| | 03:43 |
I think the they get more and more
ambitious with their camera moves, and
| | 03:47 |
because of that they have very short set
up times.
| | 03:52 |
there's not a lot of, there's not nearly
as much effort put into the special
| | 03:55 |
effects on set as there, as there was in
the past I think.
| | 03:58 |
So we've had to, to be able to adapt to
that.
| | 04:03 |
so, would we have liked green screen, a
little more green screen, yes.
| | 04:08 |
You know would we have liked sort of
motion capture, camera tracking, or
| | 04:12 |
better automated tracking capability.
Yes we were able to do it with sort of
| | 04:17 |
what exists that's today.
And John Adams was, was, was designed to
| | 04:22 |
be a very like almost an alverta, where,
where the camera is a POV camera.
| | 04:30 |
And you're in the midst of it, so
virtually all of it was handheld.
| | 04:34 |
Virtually all of it was shot with three
roving cameras at once.
| | 04:39 |
and it wasn't planned out during
production.
| | 04:44 |
A lot of it wasn't planned out during
production.
| | 04:46 |
The, this, the, the director wanted a
very raw feel, as if you were there.
| | 04:49 |
And so his cameras would go everywhere.
and because of that you can't really put
| | 04:54 |
up miles and miles of green screen.
so there's a lot of you know, roto,
| | 04:58 |
rotoscoping involved.
which is part for the course.
| | 05:03 |
We do match moving and tracking in a
couple different ways.
| | 05:06 |
again, we use off the shelf software like
Bujo and Synthesize.
| | 05:11 |
that, that works 70% of the time and then
the other 30% is good old by eye, hand.
| | 05:19 |
Yeah, I mean that's, that's the thing
with, the thing with visual effects in
| | 05:22 |
general is there's always an automated
way and there's always the brute force method.
| | 05:27 |
And the two clash.
and that's how you get, your, your final product.
| | 05:32 |
But you never can do it fully
automatedly.
| | 05:34 |
And you can,i would take forever if you
did it by hand all the time.
| | 05:37 |
So, one wins out over the other at some
point.
| | 05:41 |
two and a half of these have been sorta
really.
| | 05:45 |
one of the big changes with, with bigger
composting of the last few years and I
| | 05:49 |
think has really helped speed up the work
flow.
| | 05:54 |
It puts more, you know, work on the
composer's part, butLAUGH, but in, you
| | 05:58 |
know, rendering things into 2D is a lot
faster than rendering things in 3D.
| | 06:03 |
So whenever we can offload, that kind of,
of work to the compositor, we tend to do it.
| | 06:10 |
And compositors, I think, tend to really
like expanding their, their work base.
| | 06:15 |
and John Adams included a lot of 2D, what
you'd be surprised wasn't fully 3D, I'd say.
| | 06:22 |
in fact all of our, while we did build a
set, a 3D set, of Boston based off of the
| | 06:27 |
productions, our department sets.
most of the usage of, of the sets and the
| | 06:34 |
shots were done as a map paintings.
Things that were derived from the 3D
| | 06:40 |
work, but, but it was always manipulated
into 2D and then used in 2D.
| | 06:45 |
For a particular sequence in Paris, we
had to replicate a large crowd.
| | 06:50 |
Again, the material was shot in Bulgaria
in a field, and only had about 300 extras
| | 06:55 |
that were used for the crowd sequence.
And normally what you'd do is you'd use a
| | 07:01 |
300 extras and move them around the
field.
| | 07:05 |
And and, and a bunch of times and to
clone them and create a crowd of 30 thousand.
| | 07:12 |
But because of the roving cameras and the
lack of time that the production had, we
| | 07:17 |
only had one usable pass of 300 extras.
that was near the camera, luckily, so we
| | 07:24 |
had to build digital extras for, 90% of
the other people, I would say.
| | 07:30 |
And that was done with a combination of
people on cars that we shot here in our
| | 07:36 |
parking lot, and 3D animated characters.
That were, done in exercise behavior.
| | 07:44 |
I think at the end of the day, the more
adaptable you are the, the better off
| | 07:47 |
you'll be.
You'll, you'll do a better job creatively
| | 07:51 |
and, and be able to get the job done I
think in a good amount of time.
| | 07:56 |
Because, cuz no shots are as much
planning as you'd like to do.
| | 08:00 |
Especially when you're on a show like
John Adams or you're handed material
| | 08:04 |
after the fact.
you still have to get it done regardless
| | 08:09 |
of how, how it was shot.
And the more you're able to think of new
| | 08:13 |
ways of and completing that work.
being creative about not only the, the
| | 08:18 |
art of it but also the technique of it.
The more successful you'll be.
| | 08:22 |
>> You know, the pay off is when you
make it work and you know.
| | 08:26 |
And all comes together and, you know,
people watch it and they go, so what'd
| | 08:29 |
you do.
That's the ultimate compliment, you know,
| | 08:33 |
that's the one I'm always going for.
I don't, I don't want people to know what
| | 08:37 |
I did, you know, then, then I did my job.
| | 08:40 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating set extensions: Adding buildings to a scene| 00:02 |
A lot of times you'll need to do set
extensions, or expanding a scene.
| | 00:07 |
And in this case, I've got this small
town.
| | 00:11 |
It's kind of a, an older building's in a
small town.
| | 00:15 |
I wanted to kind of give this a little
more of a metropolitan feel.
| | 00:18 |
So I enlarge the building and added some
new buildings and throw a water tower in there.
| | 00:23 |
And it just made it a more metropolitan
without looking like big city.
| | 00:29 |
I just wanted to kind of increase my set
here, and also get rid of a couple
| | 00:32 |
elements here.
And this was all done in Photoshop, and
| | 00:36 |
After Effects.
I didn't really use any other plugins or
| | 00:39 |
anything to do this.
I'm going to go through a couple movies here
| | 00:43 |
and show you how to achieve this kind of
a look.
| | 00:46 |
Even when you're using you know, standard
definition footage.
| | 00:50 |
You know, you can notice I've got some
noise up here.
| | 00:53 |
So I'm going to show you a movie after this
one about creating a matching noise movie
| | 00:57 |
in Photoshop.
Which is really kind of a cool trick and
| | 01:01 |
I've been using it for years to kind of
bring my mattes to life.
| | 01:05 |
So let's take a look at how this was
built and we'll go over to Photoshop.
| | 01:10 |
And look at the actual pieces here.
I started with just a single frame from
| | 01:15 |
the video.
And then I started adding in elements.
| | 01:20 |
Well I wanted to work on this building
here first.
| | 01:23 |
And kind of create an extension of that
building.
| | 01:27 |
So I took elements of the building.
Scaled it, and kind of kept my
| | 01:30 |
perspective right.
In there and I kind of wanted it to look
| | 01:35 |
like it was accessible.
Like there might be people walking around
| | 01:38 |
or standing up there.
So if we add some people in green screen
| | 01:41 |
we could actually slip them in up there
if they were walking around up on top of
| | 01:45 |
this balcony area here.
So I put a railing up there.
| | 01:49 |
And built that so I've got my railing as
a separate area.
| | 01:54 |
I've got my top floor and of course the
bottom floor here has been cleaned up and
| | 01:59 |
added in there.
Now, I've got a second building here and
| | 02:04 |
this is basically all made from pretty
much nothing.
| | 02:08 |
I've got the crown on there I took from I
don't know example of a, from another
| | 02:12 |
building piece.
I've go a base down here, that's just
| | 02:17 |
along the bottom here, it kind of connects
to the existing building, there.
| | 02:22 |
Then I've got all these different shapes.
And these are just shapes with a, just a
| | 02:26 |
little bit of a layer style on it, to
kind of create some dimension in there.
| | 02:31 |
I've got all these many little shapes
that I've painted in there to give me
| | 02:35 |
details on this building.
If I take them all out you'll see we
| | 02:39 |
start losing all the building there, I
take my windows.
| | 02:42 |
And I've got a wall, that's basically
what I started with and I painted all the
| | 02:46 |
in, give it some color and texture.
And just started adding elements in,
| | 02:51 |
architecual elements.
To kind of create this facade.
| | 02:55 |
And then I've got another building here
which was made up of several different
| | 02:59 |
elements as well.
I've got the front which is taken from
| | 03:03 |
another photograph.
I've put in this fake side here.
| | 03:08 |
I've got a crown from another building
that I put on there.
| | 03:12 |
I've got this old cola sign and then a
texture map for it.
| | 03:16 |
So it kind of looks like it's all peeled
paint from an old sign on an old building.
| | 03:21 |
And you know, this isn't perfect but for
a quick, you know, two or three second shot.
| | 03:27 |
That's for a quick map painting, this
definitely works.
| | 03:30 |
This definitely gets the job done.
Then I put in this water tower.
| | 03:34 |
And just grab that from another image,
stuck that in there.
| | 03:39 |
And I'm not too concerned about anything
covering up the trees here because I'm
| | 03:43 |
going to use the blue sky back here.
To map out the trees that are moving and
| | 03:48 |
blowing in the wind in After Effects.
So and I've got a cleaned up area here.
| | 03:53 |
I wanted to get this traffic signal out
of there, so I added that into the
| | 03:57 |
building here.
Now when I'm done here is I actually each
| | 04:01 |
of these buildings with all the pieces.
So it's easier to bring into After
| | 04:06 |
Effects, and I just merge my group down,
so that I just end up with one layer.
| | 04:11 |
So if I look at that I've got one here
that I've already merged all my groupings together.
| | 04:17 |
Got each building, we've got the water
tower separate.
| | 04:20 |
Each building is separate here.
And that way I've got a little bit more control.
| | 04:24 |
I bring it all in as a composite, comp,
into After Effects.
| | 04:30 |
And you can see here, here's all my
different buildings.
| | 04:34 |
Different levels, so I bring that all in.
And I use that as a comp in my main comp.
| | 04:39 |
So all my buildings are in a comp here.
So you can see as I cycle through here
| | 04:43 |
I've got them just coming on over time.
And there they are.
| | 04:48 |
Now what I've done is I've made a second
comp here.
| | 04:51 |
And I've just got a masked out version of
the movie here with the soft feather with
| | 04:56 |
the trees and the sky in there.
And then I just bring that in with a
| | 05:01 |
Blending mode.
So I go to my Blending mode here and I've
| | 05:05 |
got Darken.
Because I just want the trees to silhouette.
| | 05:11 |
That area where they do overlap.
So, it only darkens the pixels there.
| | 05:16 |
So if they come over the buildings here,
then in the water tower you'll see that
| | 05:19 |
it actually just works that way.
I didn't have to key anything that way.
| | 05:24 |
I didn't have to use a plugin to key
anything so you can see the difference there.
| | 05:27 |
And so using just Photoshop and After
Effects I was able to create a really
| | 05:31 |
quick matte painting.
And next movie I'll show you how to
| | 05:35 |
create your noise movie in Photoshop and
bring that into After Effects.
| | 05:40 |
And that's going to add a little bit of
noise to these still images here so they
| | 05:44 |
blend in better.
With the video itself.
| | 06:00 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating video noise loops in Photoshop| 00:02 |
And when I do my Matte Extensions and
Matte Paintings and I'm using still
| | 00:05 |
images, and bringing them in layers.
I like to make sure that I'm adding back
| | 00:11 |
in some noise on top of those static
images, so that the blend is back into
| | 00:15 |
the actual video itself.
We notice up here in the sky, there is a
| | 00:20 |
little bit of noise.
This is a standard def shot.
| | 00:25 |
So I needed to bring some of that pixel
excitement back into the matted areas.
| | 00:31 |
These big surfaces here needed a little
bit of motion in there.
| | 00:35 |
And there are some plug-ins that you can
use, that create video noise.
| | 00:40 |
I like to have a little more control of
that and create my own noise movies in
| | 00:44 |
Photoshop, and that's done pretty
quickly.
| | 00:49 |
We'll just open up Photoshop and create a
new file, and since this is standard def
| | 00:53 |
then go with 720 by 480.
And I want a white background, and I'm
| | 00:58 |
going to use the Noise filter.
I go to Noise > Add Noise.
| | 01:03 |
And I think for this, about 3% Gaussian
monochromatic will work.
| | 01:09 |
And we'll apply that.
And I'm going to, create several frames
| | 01:13 |
here because, just putting a static noise
layer over something isn't going to do anything.
| | 01:19 |
It's just going to have a grain to it.
So it won't move.
| | 01:22 |
We need to make an exciting noise pattern
here.
| | 01:26 |
Now the Noise filter in Photoshop creates
a random pattern every time you apply it.
| | 01:33 |
It doesn't repeat the pattern any two
times.
| | 01:36 |
So if we create a new layer, and apply
the noise to it, then it will be a
| | 01:39 |
different noise pattern.
So I'll use my keyboard shortcuts here
| | 01:44 |
and create a new layer Cmd + J, and then
I use Cmd + Delete which gives me the
| | 01:48 |
white background fill.
And then Cmd + F, which re-applies the
| | 01:53 |
last filter used to which was my noise
filter.
| | 01:56 |
And I, I'm now looking at a different
layer with different noise pattern on it,
| | 02:01 |
and I figure okay if I can do this for
two layers, let's do it for like 15.
| | 02:08 |
And then we'll have 15 frames of this
noise loop that we can create.
| | 02:13 |
And use it as a QuickTime movie.
So I'm going to just keep doing the Cmd +
| | 02:17 |
J, Cmd + Delete, Cmd + F, and do that
several times, until I've got several
| | 02:22 |
layers of this noise.
And I'll do it until I've got 15 frames
| | 02:32 |
duplicated here.
And I think I'll go to copy 13.
| | 02:39 |
I believe that gives me 15 total.
Doesn't have to be exact.
| | 02:44 |
It's just a noise loop, so it's not that
big a deal.
| | 02:46 |
So, I've got all these different frames
in here, now how do I make this animation.
| | 02:50 |
Well it's pretty simple, you go to Window
> Animation.
| | 02:54 |
And I click down here to make sure that
I'm on Frame animation.
| | 02:59 |
And the default here says ten seconds.
So let's go to No Delay.
| | 03:03 |
And I want this to loop forever, so I can
preview it.
| | 03:07 |
Now, I'm going to come over here to my
palette menu and select Make Frames from Layers.
| | 03:14 |
That's going to take everyone of these
layers and create a frame out of it.
| | 03:18 |
So, now when I play this back.
You'll see I've got this nice video noise
| | 03:22 |
loop going on in here.
That works really great.
| | 03:26 |
Now, I'm going to export this.
So, I'll export it.
| | 03:30 |
Render video and I make sure that I put
it in the place where I want it to be.
| | 03:35 |
I have got QuickTime movie settings here.
I make sure that my size is correct, 720
| | 03:39 |
× 480 for a standard def and that my
frame rate is correct.
| | 03:43 |
Well, I've already done that so let's
skip that step.
| | 03:46 |
I've already brought it in here, so now
I've got this movie and we play back.
| | 03:50 |
There's our video noise movie.
And how do I utilize this?
| | 03:53 |
Well I got to my composition.
Now I've put this in here, and in this
| | 03:57 |
case I've gone ahead and made a matt
around the elements, the still elements
| | 04:00 |
that I've got in here.
So I've got this nice loose matte around
| | 04:05 |
these elements, so that it constricts the
noise to just that area.
| | 04:10 |
And I've given it a Blending mode of
Multiply.
| | 04:14 |
So I go to Multiply.
If I go to Normal we'll just see white noise.
| | 04:18 |
We don't need that of course.
So we'll go to our Blending mode of
| | 04:21 |
Multiply, and that's just going to use
the dark pixels.
| | 04:25 |
And that's enough to excite the pixels to
give us that effect of the video noise,
| | 04:30 |
and kind of brings the static elements into
the whole scene.
| | 04:36 |
And your eyes don't go to as going hm,
that looks fake.
| | 04:42 |
So that's one way of creating a little
more depth and believability in your
| | 04:48 |
Matte Pintings, by creating a little
video noise.
| | 04:54 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Multiple moving elements and layers| 00:02 |
But sometimes when I'm doing my Matte
painting, I'll use some of the video
| | 00:05 |
elements from the original layers to
create part of my scene.
| | 00:09 |
And keep things moving.
As you can see here in this exploding
| | 00:12 |
view here of all the different layers
down in, I actually shot a video for
| | 00:17 |
about oh, five minutes or so.
Waiting for cars to come though.
| | 00:23 |
And made a little more traffic on the
road, by masking out individual cars and
| | 00:28 |
putting them back into the scene.
And since it was a locked off shot, that
| | 00:33 |
was pretty easy to do.
I also used some of the tree elements in
| | 00:36 |
various parts of the scene.
So that the paint layers aren't real
| | 00:41 |
static, I've got wind blowing and the
trees and wanted to keep that movement,
| | 00:45 |
and that depth going there.
So let's take a lot at this in After
| | 00:50 |
Effects, now you'll be able to follow
along With this file.
| | 00:55 |
I've got this available for you to
reverse engineer and take a look at, and
| | 00:58 |
see how it was done.
There's one plug in that it's going to
| | 01:02 |
ask for, and that is the Tsunami Plugin
from Red Giant.
| | 01:07 |
You can go and download the demo version
of it for free, it'll just be
| | 01:10 |
watermarked, or it may have an x through
it or something.
| | 01:14 |
But you'll be able to try it out and see
how that works.
| | 01:17 |
That's a pretty incredible plugin.
We'll take a look at that in minute.
| | 01:20 |
Now, I've got my original layer down
here.
| | 01:24 |
That is my original movie layer.
And it is a locked off shot, up on the
| | 01:28 |
hill here, and if we scrub through and
just see, there's not a whole lot of
| | 01:33 |
traffic in this part of it here.
I've got one car coming over the bridge
| | 01:39 |
here, and a car moving there.
Well how did I add all the other cars in?
| | 01:43 |
I used different times of the movie and
then masked them out.
| | 01:49 |
If we, and so will that, there we go.
I've got this one here, this truck, and
| | 01:54 |
what I've done is I've actually created a
paint mask for it.
| | 02:00 |
And it's just a blue mask, so that I can
see where it is in time as I move it
| | 02:04 |
along there.
And I just did that because it was just
| | 02:08 |
an easy way to make a matte.
And a Track Matte from that.
| | 02:13 |
I could've just done the same thing with
just moving the mask around, this way I
| | 02:16 |
could do it quickly.
I could scale it over time and this is
| | 02:20 |
just an easy way to make a matte.
So no matter how you want a matte or mask
| | 02:24 |
in an element like that, I just use the
different point in time.
| | 02:28 |
When this car happened to be coming over
the bridge.
| | 02:31 |
And I could add that in and just mask
around it.
| | 02:35 |
So, that was a real easy way to handle
that, because I don't have to worry about
| | 02:39 |
a really sharp matte around the car
because it's the same shot.
| | 02:45 |
It's just a different part of time.
It doesn't matter if there's trees in the
| | 02:47 |
way or shadows or whatever.
The only thing that would be an issue is
| | 02:51 |
there is one point where this car from
the foreground that starts here, does
| | 02:55 |
cross over in front of these other cars.
And I have to make sure that I matte them
| | 03:02 |
out accordingly, as well.
As it crosses the bridge here, I believe,
| | 03:06 |
there's a little collision and I have to
matte and match that.
| | 03:11 |
So that the car, does show up as it goes
through there.
| | 03:14 |
So that's something, that's an area you
have to be careful about.
| | 03:18 |
So, that was just a real simple way of
adding the cars back in.
| | 03:23 |
Every other layer here, is these paint
layers.
| | 03:26 |
If we look at those in Photoshop, got em
here.
| | 03:31 |
I've got some elements, I'm not even sure
if I ended up using this tree, I think it
| | 03:35 |
took it back out.
The back railing here was just a Paint
| | 03:38 |
layer, and that was just painted in, it's
all done in Photoshop.
| | 03:43 |
So I kind of faked in some of the rust
colors and some of the textures, a little
| | 03:47 |
bit of the 3-D effect of the railing.
And some of the shadows, I just kind of
| | 03:52 |
faked that in.
As I used my original clip here as my template.
| | 03:58 |
And I've got my front rail, same type of
thing there, created a railing.
| | 04:01 |
The cliff is a photographic element that
seemed like it was matching the lighting
| | 04:06 |
pretty close.
The lawn was fake and created in there
| | 04:11 |
along with the curving for the road to
follow along there.
| | 04:15 |
Sidewalks are pretty much just a texture
that were, was put on there to simulate
| | 04:19 |
kind of like a bike path or a nice
walking boulevard here.
| | 04:23 |
And then the hills again, more
photographic elements that just kind of
| | 04:27 |
cover up our ugly background here.
Our background, our original, this was
| | 04:32 |
basically an industrial park.
You know with so, some hills added in
| | 04:36 |
there that weren't there in the original.
So those are our paint elements that I
| | 04:41 |
added in.
And then we've got some of the trees, and
| | 04:45 |
this is the area that I really wanted to
show you.
| | 04:49 |
I took some trees here, which were bushes
that were moving in the wind over time.
| | 04:54 |
And I was able to matte them or mask them
back in cover up some of these other elements.
| | 05:00 |
Like there's a big communications box I
covered up there.
| | 05:04 |
And over here, I've got one of the trees
down here in the lawn area, and its
| | 05:08 |
moving pretty briskly because there's a
little bit of a breeze or wind that day.
| | 05:15 |
And then there's some shrubbery back
along there that I also put in to kind of
| | 05:18 |
blend in this hillside and make
everything seem real.
| | 05:22 |
And that really helps bring in your
static elements, to tie them in and make
| | 05:26 |
them feel a little more real without
doing a whole lot of work.
| | 05:31 |
And I didn't have to do any CG work or
anything there.
| | 05:34 |
The only CG that's in this whole thing,
is the actual water and that's using the
| | 05:39 |
plug in from Red Giant, the Tsunami
Plugin.
| | 05:43 |
So, if we look at that plug in here, I'm
not going to make any changes to this
| | 05:47 |
because any little changes are going to
change it drastically, and take awhile to render.
| | 05:53 |
But you can take a look at this, and you
can look at some of the tutorials from
| | 05:57 |
Red Giant's site, on how to deal with the
water.
| | 06:02 |
But the light, the waves, are handled by
height, and by the grid of it.
| | 06:09 |
The details, the scale, the amount of
flow that's going on, that's handled by
| | 06:15 |
wind speed.
So, in the final, it's just looks like
| | 06:20 |
the water's running down this canal or
this channel.
| | 06:23 |
And you can see the actual mask that I
used for that.
| | 06:30 |
That's a Track matte there.
And that controls where the water is visible.
| | 06:36 |
Now another thing, if I turn this off,
you can see that I have a little bit of
| | 06:40 |
transparency on this layer.
And I just applied it to a solid color
| | 06:45 |
layer, and I left a little bit of
transparency in there so you could see
| | 06:48 |
some of the texture underneath.
You know it's just a canal full of you
| | 06:54 |
know weeds and junk and it's just a
little trickle of water at this time.
| | 06:58 |
But if I want to show it with this raging
water going through here, I turn on my
| | 07:02 |
plug in.
And you can see here there is a little
| | 07:05 |
bit of transparency to show some depth,
that it's not really deep.
| | 07:09 |
It's not a really deep canal.
It's fairly shallow, but it, it has some
| | 07:13 |
water moving in there.
And that kind of completes this scene.
| | 07:19 |
So if we'll look at the final rendering
here, we'll see that the water is moving.
| | 07:23 |
It looks like it's moving in a direction
here.
| | 07:26 |
The sun light's coming from a specific
angle, and that's actually programmed
| | 07:31 |
into the plugin.
That allows you to pick the angle of the
| | 07:35 |
light and everything.
The amount water movement here.
| | 07:38 |
I've got a little semi-transparency
there, so you see a little bit of the
| | 07:41 |
texture underneath.
So it has more of a believable look.
| | 07:45 |
Now we can see these trees are moving
over here off to the right.
| | 07:49 |
So we've got tree movement throughout the
whole scene.
| | 07:53 |
It doesn't look too static.
We've got a little bit of cloud movement.
| | 07:57 |
The clouds aren't sped up they're natural
speed.
| | 07:59 |
So it doesn't look too corny or too
cheesy with that, you know, rapid cloud movement.
| | 08:04 |
You see a little hint of the city back
here, just peeking up over the, edge of
| | 08:09 |
the hills there.
This all ties it in with perspective,
| | 08:13 |
with motion, and believability, with all
of the little details that we put in
| | 08:17 |
there in trying to keep everything in
motion here.
| | 08:22 |
So, when you are creating your mattes,
when you're creating a complex composite
| | 08:26 |
like this where you have a lot of
elements.
| | 08:28 |
Don't forget to make sure you're adding
motion back in where you're painting
| | 08:32 |
things over.
If you have everything that's too static
| | 08:36 |
it just won't have that sense of
believability.
| | 08:40 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Lighting Techniques in PostSimulating lighting to change a scene in post| 00:04 |
On this project I want to show how easy
it is to totally change, the feeling, the emotion.
| | 00:11 |
And the setting of a scene just by making
some variations in our levels and
| | 00:16 |
replacing our background.
Now in this case we start with a project
| | 00:21 |
that we did in chapter three for the
match moving.
| | 00:24 |
And it's the Christmas window project.
And in this case we had warmed up all of
| | 00:29 |
the foreground lighting, the frame around
the window.
| | 00:33 |
And everything to kind of match this warm
homey feeling here.
| | 00:37 |
But what we're going to do is actually
change it.
| | 00:40 |
To a different part of the world.
And we're in a big city now.
| | 00:44 |
So we're looking out the window of a high
rise building.
| | 00:48 |
And the lighting coming back in is much
cooler.
| | 00:51 |
It's a winter scene, so, it's going to
have this reflective light.
| | 00:55 |
It's going to be very blue, which is
going to make everything look kind of
| | 00:58 |
blue and kind of pinkish.
Instead of this nice warm glow.
| | 01:02 |
So in this case, we change not only the
background.
| | 01:04 |
But we also change some of the lighting.
And there are a few different steps we
| | 01:08 |
need to take to do this.
So we can open up that Chapter 3 project.
| | 01:15 |
The Christmas Windows Track project.
And I have already created one comp
| | 01:19 |
that's already done for you.
It's the Christmas Window Lighting city.
| | 01:24 |
And that's already done.
We'll refer to that to kind of speed
| | 01:27 |
things up here.
But we're going to start with the one
| | 01:31 |
that was completed from that chapter.
And that's the Christmas Window Home completed.
| | 01:36 |
And this has everything and it has all
our levels for this.
| | 01:40 |
Masks are all created for the snow and
everything.
| | 01:44 |
So we're going to modify this one.
And create an entirely different scene.
| | 01:49 |
So the first thing that I'm going to do
is get a new background in.
| | 01:52 |
And this I stock photo image, here, is
going to be our background that we'll use.
| | 01:57 |
And it's this city scene.
And I just hide the original one, which
| | 02:01 |
was with the snowman in the yard.
And we can see while the colors are way
| | 02:06 |
off here and everything.
We're going to have to do a few things to
| | 02:09 |
make this work.
Well, first thing I wannna do is so I
| | 02:12 |
don't have to go through all the steps of
retracking anything.
| | 02:16 |
Is, I'm going to just copy all of my key
frames from the original.
| | 02:20 |
So, I just select and drag over here.
And hit Cmd+C or Ctrl+C on the PC.
| | 02:28 |
And then I close that up, twirl this down
here.
| | 02:32 |
Come down to Transform, make sure that
I'm at frame 0 and I just paste.
| | 02:38 |
And it will automatically change all my
anchor point position.
| | 02:41 |
And scale and have all that tracking
information, in there right on that layer.
| | 02:46 |
So, I'm set to go there.
So, let's close this back up.
| | 02:51 |
We don't have to do anything more to that
layer, 'cuz we're going to keep that cool
| | 02:54 |
color in there.
That's actually going to be what we use
| | 02:58 |
to transform our foreground so that it
matches a little better.
| | 03:02 |
Another thing I'm going to do is, I'm
going to, get rid of this Mask layer here.
| | 03:08 |
Because we no longer have artificial
light that's lighting up the snow.
| | 03:14 |
So we don't need that.
Actually, I can just hit Delete.
| | 03:19 |
And that way our snow is on it's own
layer here.
| | 03:22 |
And will come back up here to Track matte
to No Track matte.
| | 03:27 |
And that's set.
I'll need to change my color on that
| | 03:30 |
snow, so I'm going to click on Hue
saturation here, and just delete that.
| | 03:36 |
Because I want it to be a little wider.
I want it to be a little cooler in color temperature.
| | 03:41 |
So now I've got my background and, I've
got my snow has already set there.
| | 03:46 |
But one thing I want to do, is actually add
more snow.
| | 03:50 |
Because we're looking at a wider range
here and deeper.
| | 03:54 |
So I'm going to go at about 4000 here and I
may change the speed up a bit, go to like 0.75.
| | 03:59 |
And that will give us more snow and a
little higher drop rate.
| | 04:04 |
And that way it will look a little more
believable, be it a little more dense as
| | 04:08 |
we're looking out the window.
'Cuz we're not just looking in a short
| | 04:13 |
little shallow area in a yard.
We're actually looking out a window of a
| | 04:18 |
skyscraper here.
So, that sets up our background.
| | 04:22 |
We're all set there.
Now, what we have to do is bring our
| | 04:24 |
foreground, into play here.
So, we're going to be changing our colors
| | 04:28 |
here quite a bit.
So, I'm going to my levels on this layer
| | 04:32 |
and I'm just going to click Reset.
Which takes a second to reset, there we go.
| | 04:38 |
And I'm going to start at this point and
actually bring everything down just a bit.
| | 04:45 |
Because it's going to be a little darker
in here.
| | 04:48 |
And then I want to cool it off, so I'm
going to come down here to my blues.
| | 04:52 |
And I'm going to to make everything go a
little bit more toward blue.
| | 04:56 |
So we're actually getting a little bit of
this pink, in here.
| | 05:01 |
And then, I'm going to actually, bring
the reds down just a little bit.
| | 05:10 |
But don't want it to go too red.
There we go again, make it a little less
| | 05:14 |
saturated that way.
There we go.
| | 05:17 |
And may bring the whites down just a bit
so they're not quite so intense.
| | 05:25 |
So I'm going to bring my output light down
just a little.
| | 05:34 |
So this is kind of a subjective theme,
you can play with a bit.
| | 05:39 |
The blues, I think I might back off just
a little bit, I went a little too far
| | 05:43 |
with the blues.
But you can play around with that, you
| | 05:47 |
can go back and forth.
And look and see the one that we already
| | 05:51 |
did, to the one that you're working on.
I'm still having a problem here with this
| | 05:56 |
being to light over here.
I wannna darken that up, bring more of
| | 06:00 |
the focus around the tree here.
And the way that I did that was to just
| | 06:04 |
duplicate this layer.
Just Cmd+D, on the keyboard, or Ctrl+D on
| | 06:09 |
the PC.
And I've, don't really need to mess with
| | 06:13 |
this right now.
I'm going to create a new mask here.
| | 06:17 |
So let me bring this down to a little
smaller where I can see what I'm working on.
| | 06:24 |
I'm going to create just a really crude
mask here.
| | 06:26 |
Around this part of the image area, let's
close it up.
| | 06:37 |
Then I'll come over here and Mask shape,
and Feather.
| | 06:41 |
Feather's what I want here.
Then we'll come up to Mask feather.
| | 06:47 |
And I'm going to go about 250 pixels.
Because I want a nice big soft feathered
| | 06:53 |
area here.
And then I'll just drag this over a bit.
| | 07:00 |
And notice I started on frame 0.
Very important that I start there,
| | 07:03 |
because I'm going to have to move this a bit
as I go down in time.
| | 07:07 |
And we can hide the layer underneath.
So we can see about how much we're affecting.
| | 07:14 |
And I'm going to come in here to my
levels on this layer and I'm going to
| | 07:18 |
make it a bit darker.
So, let's go to our RGB Channels and then
| | 07:24 |
we'll make that go considerably darker.
So that our focus really is on this tree
| | 07:31 |
and the light that's coming from here.
So, go too dark but that's, that's better.
| | 07:39 |
Now what's going to happen is as the
camera passes by.
| | 07:43 |
It's actually going to change where the
focus is so this has to track, that.
| | 07:49 |
And we're just going to do just a real
simple Mask match move with it.
| | 07:54 |
So let's go back to frame 0, open up my
mask.
| | 07:58 |
And click on the Stopwatch for Mask path,
which sets it there.
| | 08:03 |
Then I'll come out here a little ways,
right around three seconds, and then move
| | 08:09 |
this guy over just a little bit.
And I may start to bring these down.
| | 08:17 |
Because we're going to get closer here.
So I come back out to my last frame.
| | 08:21 |
And wait for it to redraw.
There we go.
| | 08:26 |
That's all set.
So let's grab all of them and we'll move
| | 08:30 |
them up, and over.
And then bring these two down.
| | 08:36 |
So, what we're basically doing is trying
to just mask out what area is going to be dark.
| | 08:41 |
And what area is going to stay light.
So now we can see that back.
| | 08:46 |
Let's look at the one that's already
finished here for a comparison.
| | 08:50 |
I went a little darker with that one.
But you can see here that the mask has
| | 08:54 |
moved slightly over time.
To kind of follow that main direction
| | 09:00 |
where the light's coming from.
Looks something like this.
| | 09:06 |
And now we've got an entirely different
scene built from something that we
| | 09:10 |
already based it on.
And this is important to know how to do this.
| | 09:14 |
And do it pretty quickly because you're
going to get clients that say, you know,
| | 09:17 |
I really like that, but we need to change
it up.
| | 09:20 |
We need to change it this year, and
you're using something you created last year.
| | 09:24 |
And they want to change, you know, a
setting or something, or they want to see
| | 09:27 |
variations of something.
We want to see what this would look like
| | 09:30 |
for this, this, this, and this.
And that way your not having to re-invent
| | 09:33 |
the wheel all the time.
But you are able to basically do the job
| | 09:37 |
once and then, make modifications to that
time and time again.
| | 09:42 |
That just gives you a lot more control
and a lot more variations that you can present.
| | 09:48 |
Or just to be creative for your own
purposes.
| | 09:51 |
That's just another way to be creative,
using the same project.
| | 09:57 |
And just applying some assimilated
lighting changes to it.
| | 10:02 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using layer styles to create shadows and light| 00:02 |
Now one thing that I keep driving home,
that to make your composite very
| | 00:05 |
believable, is you have to make sure that
the lighting matches your background.
| | 00:10 |
In a lot of cases, you can shoot
something really well, you get your
| | 00:13 |
composite together.
And you're still lacking just that little
| | 00:16 |
bit of an edge, that really brings your
foreground and background together.
| | 00:21 |
And a lot times that's a light direction,
or maybe a subtle, subtle Drop Shadow
| | 00:25 |
behind them onto the background.
Well, those are two things I'm going to
| | 00:29 |
explore here in this movie.
The first is, adding just a little bit
| | 00:34 |
more of a light edge here on her face and
her forearm.
| | 00:39 |
And we're going to achieve that with a
very simple tool, which is the Layer
| | 00:43 |
Style Effects.
And I've got that layer selected here in
| | 00:47 |
my timeline.
I'm coming up to my Layer and then Layer
| | 00:51 |
Styles and you would probably think,
well, an Inner Glow would work wouldn't it?
| | 00:57 |
Well, no the problem with an Inner Glow
is it takes all of the edges and brings a
| | 01:00 |
glow around the whole edge and I want
something that's very directional.
| | 01:04 |
So, I'm going to create my own light
glow, from the Inner Shadow selection.
| | 01:10 |
Of course that starts with a black
shadow.
| | 01:13 |
And so, I want to come down here to my
Layer Styles Settings, in the timeline.
| | 01:18 |
Click Open Inner Shadow, and I'm going to
change this from Multiply, to Screen And
| | 01:24 |
then change this to white.
For now.
| | 01:28 |
We'll come back and tweak it a little
bit.
| | 01:31 |
And I'm going to leave the opacity where
it is for now.
| | 01:33 |
Just so I can see where I'm positioning
everything.
| | 01:35 |
So, the first thing I want to do is
change the direction of the light source.
| | 01:41 |
And I just click and drag this until it
gets into position.
| | 01:44 |
Want it to come right about two o'clock
or so, and now I see this white glow is
| | 01:48 |
on the side that I want to work with.
I'm going to increase the distance just a
| | 01:55 |
little bit.
And then bring this down, increase the
| | 01:58 |
size so it's just a little softer.
Now, it's giving me this really harsh you
| | 02:03 |
know white glow.
We're not going to leave it there of course.
| | 02:07 |
But the next thing I want to do is to come
down to Opacity, and I'm going to bring that
| | 02:12 |
way down.
So, that just getting a slight, slight
| | 02:17 |
glow here.
Start at zero and just start to bring it up.
| | 02:21 |
Now I'm seeing that glow here.
And now I've got pretty much where I want it.
| | 02:25 |
I just want to bring it out of being a
really harsh white.
| | 02:28 |
And warm it up just a bit so, I'll bring
my colors up here.
| | 02:34 |
Bring it just, so that it's a little
warmer light.
| | 02:37 |
Now, I can play with my opacity just a
little bit more, and then do a quick RAM
| | 02:42 |
preview, and see how that works.
'Kay, our RAM preview's running now.
| | 02:49 |
And we can see it just softens up a
little bit of this edge, just a little more.
| | 02:53 |
It kind of enhances the light that was
already on that side of her face and her body.
| | 02:59 |
And just gives us just a little bit of a
softness and a little warmth.
| | 03:03 |
It really helps to combine the foreground
and background just that much more.
| | 03:12 |
That's one thing that I'll use the Layer
Styles for.
| | 03:14 |
Another thing I'll use it for is a Drop
Shadow.
| | 03:18 |
Now in this case, I've got this guy
jumping, kind of over the curb here in
| | 03:22 |
front of this bush, and he's all excited
and he's running around.
| | 03:28 |
I've used this in some of the other
tutorials this clip, but one thing that
| | 03:32 |
will really help sell it a bit,
especially when he's jumping in.
| | 03:37 |
And to establish the distance that he is
from that bush and to bring him back into
| | 03:41 |
that background, is to add a little bit
of a Drop Shadow.
| | 03:45 |
Well, I'm going to come up here to my
Layer Styles and into Layer > Layer Styles.
| | 03:52 |
And I'll use a Drop Shadow.
And I'm going to exaggerate it, of course
| | 03:56 |
to really define where I'm going to be
with it.
| | 03:59 |
And I'll start with the distance.
And I'll bring that way down here.
| | 04:07 |
I'll move my angle, so that he is, right
about there.
| | 04:12 |
And we're going to go very subtle with this
in the end.
| | 04:15 |
So, it's not going to be a real harsh Drop
Shadow.
| | 04:18 |
And let me see, I may need a little more
distance here, bring it back down.
| | 04:23 |
And then I kind of want to gauge where it
is, when he's coming in.
| | 04:28 |
He's standing there.
And then that's there.
| | 04:30 |
That's pretty good, that's pretty much
where I want it to be.
| | 04:34 |
Now I'm going to come in here and bring
my opacity way down, so that it's very,
| | 04:38 |
very subtle.
It's not a very bright day out, it's not
| | 04:42 |
that drastic of a Drop Shadow, but it's
just enough, to give the illusion, that
| | 04:46 |
he's really in front of it there.
Okay, so, you can see it's very subtle
| | 04:52 |
Drop Shadow, but it's just enough to
kind of sell that composite.
| | 04:57 |
Whether it's a flat background, or a,
very subtle three dimensional background,
| | 05:01 |
you can use this effect, you can mask it,
if you have several different layers.
| | 05:08 |
That you need to effected on, there's so
many things you can do just by using this
| | 05:11 |
simple Layer Style.
I use this all the time even in some of
| | 05:15 |
the feature films I work on, I'll just
cheat and use a little bit of this, fake
| | 05:18 |
Drop Shadow.
And its amazing how much it really brings
| | 05:22 |
your character and your background
together.
| | 05:25 |
So, using the Lighting Styles and the
Drop Shadow.
| | 05:30 |
Those tools just in your Layers Styles,
are enough to really help you, sell your composites.
| | 05:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Plugin fx for light wrapping and vignetting| 00:02 |
Now a lot of times when you have a
composite, your foreground character
| | 00:05 |
still looks like they're kind of a
cardboard cutout in front of a fake background.
| | 00:10 |
Well, if that's the case and you really
want that type of an effect and that's fine.
| | 00:14 |
But if you've got an extremely bright
background source there's some bright
| | 00:18 |
sunlight, you know, reflecting off from
something.
| | 00:22 |
Or the sky's really bright and your green
screen character, is actually just shot
| | 00:26 |
in a studio as this guy was.
Then we, need to do a little more to
| | 00:31 |
marry those two layers together.
And this is when I like to, rely on one
| | 00:37 |
of my favorite plug-ins, and that's the
Boris Continuum Complete's, light wrap.
| | 00:43 |
And the way the BCC light wrap works, let
me show you here.
| | 00:48 |
We'll go to BCC 8 key and blend, go down
to light wrap.
| | 00:54 |
First then I do is turn off these
handles.
| | 00:57 |
I don't like those controls.
I like to use my numbers here.
| | 00:59 |
Now, there's no difference here until I
actually select a background source.
| | 01:04 |
And what makes this unique is all I'll
use my background source layer here.
| | 01:09 |
And you see that there's a glow around
here but you can't really tell what it is
| | 01:12 |
until you can turn off the actual image
itself and look at it against black.
| | 01:18 |
Well, now we can see, oh, I see the, the
coloring is coming from the actual
| | 01:22 |
background image.
And that is going to give me a more
| | 01:26 |
believable armbient glow around my
character.
| | 01:29 |
And that is kind of the light fall off
that a camera lense would actually see if
| | 01:33 |
you were shooting this as an actual
composite on location.
| | 01:37 |
There's going to be a little bit of light
bending around the edges and that's why
| | 01:41 |
the light wrap is really an important
tool.
| | 01:45 |
Well, this is pretty strong, and there's
a couple things I would do here.
| | 01:47 |
First is I'd pull my width down because
it, I don't need that much of a light
| | 01:51 |
wrap around there.
So I'm going to bring that down a bit.
| | 01:55 |
And then I may soften it just a little
more.
| | 02:00 |
And then I'll look at it on my actual
normal face here.
| | 02:03 |
And then the mix with original, if I
crank all the way up, well, that lessens
| | 02:07 |
the effect, you can see as I go up and
down here.
| | 02:10 |
So, I start with no effect at all, and
then I slowly start to roll it off til I
| | 02:15 |
get the desired amount that I want.
And then I can just click on and off the
| | 02:20 |
effect to see my before and after.
And that's just enough to soften up these
| | 02:25 |
edges a bit.
Make them a little more believable.
| | 02:28 |
And it's really effective if you have
somebody with a lot of dark hair or
| | 02:32 |
clothing, and you didn't get the green
screen shot.
| | 02:36 |
You had it lit with a lot of backlight.
He was lit with a kind of a hair light
| | 02:40 |
here, rim light.
Which is kind of orange, which might not
| | 02:43 |
be the best for this type of a composite
if we wanted it to be believable.
| | 02:48 |
But I'm going to do a quick round preview
here and we can take a look back here and
| | 02:52 |
see that really does help soften out a
bit.
| | 02:56 |
It still looks like a simulated
background because it's a camera moving.
| | 03:00 |
It's going in and out of focus.
But it still doesn't look quite as harsh
| | 03:03 |
as it does without the light rap.
Another cool lighting effect I'd like to
| | 03:08 |
do is on the background itself.
And that is, if I select the background here.
| | 03:15 |
We've already got our camera lens blur
cuz it's just a still image that's moving.
| | 03:20 |
But sometimes, if you want to kind of
take your attention away from the background.
| | 03:25 |
Bring it more toward the character in
here, going to bring this back down to a
| | 03:30 |
zoom to fit up to 100% so we can see the
full edges here.
| | 03:36 |
I like to use the built-in lighting
effect, and that is found here in
| | 03:41 |
Perspective of all places, it is the CC
Spotlight.
| | 03:47 |
Okay and that comes with After Effects
and what I like to do with that is kind
| | 03:52 |
of change it a bit.
So right now let's see where's our from point.
| | 03:58 |
I want it to kind of simulate where the
sun is.
| | 04:02 |
I want to move the two point here, so
that's right in the middle and then I'm
| | 04:06 |
going to change the cone angle to be a
little broader.
| | 04:12 |
Change the height up so it rounds it out
a little more, and then the edge softness.
| | 04:16 |
We're going to go way up, kind of reset,
change the cone angle a bit more, and
| | 04:21 |
then maybe even move this point over just
a little bit.
| | 04:27 |
So what this does is it gives me kind of
a vignette here around the whole scene.
| | 04:33 |
But it doesn't affect my character.
It only affects the background itself,
| | 04:38 |
the background lighting.
So if I do a RAM preview on that, then
| | 04:42 |
we'll get to see it.
So you can see that this gives a, a
| | 04:46 |
really cool vignette.
Kind of a camera vignetting lens
| | 04:50 |
vignetting, that really helps you focus
on the character that's speaking.
| | 04:55 |
And then as the background comes into
focus we really can focus on the
| | 04:59 |
presidents on the mountainside there.
So those are a couple of my favorite
| | 05:04 |
lighting effects.
The one is from Boris, and you can go
| | 05:07 |
online and look for Boris Continuum
Complete.
| | 05:11 |
Tthat's part of a package of like 100s of
plug ins you get with their package.
| | 05:17 |
It's pretty amazing.
That's one of my favorites from them and
| | 05:19 |
it's very useful, very practical and I
use it all the time.
| | 05:22 |
And then the cc spotlight, I'll use that
on backgrounds and it really helps you
| | 05:26 |
get that really cool focus on your
character and your background
| | 05:31 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
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