sfdex opened this issue on Jul 25, 2005 ยท 8 posts
sfdex posted Mon, 25 July 2005 at 7:22 PM
Thanks for the comments, everyone. The backgrounds are rendered at 846 x 480 -- that's Photoshop's square pixel dimensions for an NTSC Widescreen standard definition image. The video is shot in 16:9 .9 pixel aspect ratio, so it's 720 x 480, but when stretched out to square pixels comes up to 846 x 480. We're doing the composites in After Effects, using Keylight and a few compositing tricks I've learned along the years. The footage was shot in front of lime green fleece (I now am the proud owner of two bolts of lime green fleece). For this particular shot the character walks from the window to the driver's compartment (on the left side of the shot) around the foreground element and looks out the window of the train (that we're looking through, more or less). He steps around the foreground wall and then appears in front of it, so I cut a masked version of just the foreground element with a pixel or two of feathering to put Cal (the actor) behind the wall and pipe, then faded it out when he was to appear in front of the wall element. Foreground elements do a lot to sell a shot, I think. I played with the levels on the video to get them to more or less match the color temp inside the train and that's about it. It is a pain to strike decent keys from DV footage, but we're getting it down to a science. The buildings whirring by in the background, by the way, are also Carrara stuff. Pretty low resolution buildings moving by and blurred in After Effects (which is a lot faster than using the 3D blur in C4P). I'm excited it's coming together, so please forgive me for blathering on.