Digital Compositing: Week Nine

This week was extremely productive! I got a complete rough cut of my project together, with full audio and sound effects since that neatly coincided with the final project of my audio class due tomorrow.

I worked on my mattes some more this week until I was mostly assured that I'd done all I could to eliminate the noise on the matte without deteriorating the actors; unfortunately the top portion of the frame on many shots wasn't salvageable and also couldn't be reliably cropped out, as actors' heads and weapons intersected the bounding area regularly.

Since I have a lot of tedious rotoscoping ahead of me to mask out the noise in a majority of my shots, Girish pointed out to me that it would be smart to get a rough cut of all of my shots together first so I didn't do any unnecessary rotoscoping on footage I wound up disregarding.

This turned out to be a fortuitous idea especially as some of my footage's compositions were too similar; since I had such incredibly HD footage to work with, I did some creative editing and cut in closer on a lot of shots, cut actors out of shots and put them into new shots, etc.

Before

 

After

I also took Girish's suggestion on a key timing issue in my shots. Previously I had actors fully entering or leaving the frame, which detracted somewhat from contiguous motion of the piece (and again meant way more rotoscoping). Instead on a number of shots I cut it so that actors are in frame and already moving on the cut, and it cuts again before the actor leaves frame.

The end result is a much nicer and more fluid effect, with which everyone I showed it to agreed. Without further adieu, I present my rough cut!



Note that this is just the superhero trailer that will play on the television screen, as that constitutes the majority of my compositing effort.

As a last note, I actually got some shaders working that look pretty good, such as a frosted glass shader for the table in my 3D living room. I don't have Renderman on my computer so I can't show an output of the table until I get to the labs tomorrow, at which point I will update this post.

Now that I have the rough cut together, I'm working on doing the rest of the rotoscoping I need, which I hope to have finished by this weekend, at which point I will start working on the special effects such as the muzzle flash for the one thug's guns.

Digital Compositing: Week Eight

I finally got all of my footage this week, so I've been working diligently to matte out all of the footage I took. All in all it came out to about 53 gigabytes worth of high-resolution image sequences. It took a seriously long time to get all of the footage into Final Cut Pro and exported out to the server, but I didn't have any particular trouble with it.

I did have some trials and tribulations when it came to actually reserving the room to take my footage. I was told that every minute of every day was completely booked, save for after 9:30 on Sunday evening; and as one could imagine it was extremely difficult to get all of my actors to show up at such an inconvenient time for an extended period of time-- I owe a lot of friends a favor right now.

I was pretty incredulous to find that the room had been reserved just to store a few cameras in there, while there were people that needed to use it to complete projects, as I discussed with you briefly, Ted.

Luckily, Dave by some happy accident had access to the green screen room, and everyone stayed for a good few hours so I got tons of footage.

I sat down with my roommates and culled through the footage to find the best takes. I got some pretty hilarious footage, and I'm feeling much more optimistic about the final product at this point; I've also found some additional places where I might want to make use of additional cheesy compositing effects such as fake muzzle flash.




One thing I noticed which is going to make my life a little difficult is the presence of the cameras and other low-hanging objects messing up my tighter shots, which the actors occasionally overlap with so I can't use a garbage matte to get rid of that. I will probably have to do some rotoscoping to compensate, as there's no way I'll be able to get in and reshoot any footage at this point.

Below are a few of the mattes that I've pulled so far that came out really nicely, with a still sample from each sequence and then the matted-out video.

Additionally, I've finalized the lighting of my living room scene; I sat down with Chris Redmann and he clued me in on the magic of using directional lights for nice bounce lighting. I'm much happier with how the scene feels now, it feels much more like a warmly-lit room with daylight filtering in through the window.

I've been having some problems with the UVs of my objects, but since I won't have my shaders done until week eleven I'm just going to apply normal image-based and procedural textures to my props. It might be computationally expensive, but I'm just rendering stills, so that should be fine.

Going forward I'm basically just focused on doing a lot of work to further clean up my mattes and compensate for some of the flaws in my shots. Also, tomorrow I have my audio production class so I'll be beginning to work on the backing music for the superhero trailer in that period, and I'll be able to get narration voice work done as well.

UPDATE:

Behold! Hilarious title cards, done in Flash with my tablet by tracing over stills of Dave and Mike posing and smiling goofily at the camera. I was originally going to just use their live-action photos and be done with it, but I decided cartoonizing them would be more faithful of an homage.