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.