From the course: Video Gear: Technical Tips

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Shooting defocused still plates

Shooting defocused still plates

From the course: Video Gear: Technical Tips

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Shooting defocused still plates

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- Now, Rich, generally speaking, when I see blurry footage, I say, "Somebody screwed up." That's not good, but in this case shooting a background plate, oftentimes having some level of blur or out-of-focusness to that background plate is a good thing. - Yeah, and we can do this digitally after the fact. I will show you how to use a tool like Photoshop and its blur gallery to enhance this, but I like to get it right in camera so it looks a bit more optical. You see here, we've got a bunch of different plates. Some of these are stills. Normally I'd shoot raw, but I decided to risk it and just go for .jpg, and we've also got some movies. Let's start by talking about the stills. So, couple things here. I like to put a stand-in in some cases, and so this allows me to judge, and what we have here is the calibration target. We've used this in past episodes, and it gives me something clear to focus on. Now, by setting the depth of field a little bit shallow in the camera, this stuff back here…

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