Crunch Time

I am in full production and no sleep mode. On wendsday I went and shot some footage for shot two and I learned a little something about interlacing footage. It is really hard to track with PFtrack. The reason being is that there are no solid points to track. I attempted to De interlace the footage and that helped a bit however I could not get a good track because of the motion blur it added during a critical camera move. To try to fix it I manually added user points however I was unable to track the footage. I will need to re-shot it this week.

To make up for lost time I pushed on assets. I was able to do a quick render and comp for shot 3. It still needs some work but it is getting there.

I also started work on the spaceship that will be hovering over the city. That and re-shotting the footage will be main focus this week. I hope to have all the CG assets done by Saturday and the footage done by monday night so that I can start rendering and comping my shots.

Shot 3 Test from James Spadafora on Vimeo.

Good to go on green Screen!

I was able to re-shoot my green-screen shot this week and this time I have something usable! I was able to get a good camera track out of PFtrack and a decent matte. I had to play a lot with the lighting to get the track to work becase I wanted to make shour that PF track could see the markers I put up even with a ton of green spill on the C-Stands. One thing that too a while though was roto-ing out a lot of the noise and rigs that I did not want in the shot. It took about 5-6 hours to get a perfect plate. I do not have a ship finished to put her in yet but I am working on it and hope to have something by Friday night.

Learning the hard way......

So this week I tackled the green screen shoot. I learned the hard way that it is supper important to get the best plate you can to get the best comp. Here is the original footage:

GreenScreenTest from James Spadafora on Vimeo.

I started with primatte first since that is what we used in class. I really like the step by step process of the toggle however when I moved thru the steps I realized that I was having a real issue with here head. There was all kinds of dark noise close to here hair values. Because of this I was battles to keep the dark wisps of hair while trying to eliminate the noise. This comp did not come out at all. The only way I would be able to easily remove the noise was to re-shoot the shot. I gave the rotopaint a try to draw out a garbage matte however I would need to go in with a tablet every frame and draw it out . I decided jest to re shoot first thing next week or friday becase there was another issue with the footage I will get to later. here was the primatte test:




Next I gave the IBK keyer a try which I did not get to far in because I found that it is a strong keyer if you have a clean BG plate. Pulling a key from IBK would be jest as much work at Primatte with a less intuitive interface. Also I had all the same issues I had with Primatte with the noise around the head.


The last Keyer I used was Keylight. I liked this keyer because I was able to pull a usable key quicker then with primatte. the sliders where a lot more useful and intuitive then the sampling method that IBK and Primatte use. This is by far my favored keyer. I still had all the same issues with the noise and hair however I was able to find a good balance using the black point slider.




There where a few good things that happened in the shoot. My lighing turned out exactly how I imagined it in my mind. I may defuse the red rim a bit but over all I was happy. That intermediate lighting class really paid off. I did not get any spill because I worked far from the screen however this caused the issue with the noise because I was getting the dark areas of the screen which made the noise. To fix this I will drop the intensity of the Keno flows pointing at the screen and work closer. Another issue I had was tracking. The points I put on the screen where to few. as soon as the ladder was out of the shot PFtrack did not has the data it needed to solve the camera. I think I will need to put more points ether on the wall or in the scene to get a good track witch will be important for bringing the scene in and do the set replace.

Week 5 Update

I do not have to much this week. I was originally planning to shoot my footage for the final this week however the weather has not been helping. I plan to shoot next week. I did the color correction tutorials with the grade node and have gotten matching the white and blacks down. Also I watched the videos about color management and the LUTs.

I also started working on some quick concepts for the futuristic fighter jet that flies over the heroes in shot two. I tried to make a cross between an F-22 and a viper. This is just a concept and no where near complete. I plan to start adding detail and a good texture this week.