I thought i was going to be rigging today but i had a hankering to do some compositing work instead. I managed to film a great plate standing out the front of my house – a car drove past just as i got the shot right. It was only going to be a 2D tracking shot, a sky replacement, nothing fancy.
It’s now about twelve hours later.
Do you know how much trouble it is to matte out a simple clear blue sky? I suddenly have a newfound respect for compositors and roto artists. It hadn’t occurred to me yet to take the job of making the sky matte into a paint program to do the stubborn bits by hand but i may end up doing just that if i can’t separate the sky from the tree line.
Then again i looked in the red channel and the image is fringing heavily between the skyline and the trees. Stupid camera. Or codec. Probably. I’d get one of these but i don’t have a spare $3000 lying around unfortunately.
I also have a newfound respect for Blender’s Movie Clip tools. The Mask tool is gleefully easy to use.
I also have a newfound respect for doing things in the proper order – render first, then composite – especially if there’s hacky colour keys involved. Even though Blender lets you render 3D straight into the compositor, don’t. Switch on all the layers (or just the ones you want to use), render an OpenEXR Multilayer and save yourself the tedium of having to re-render hours of bobbing monkey head from scratch like i did today.
The video is just a learning exercise, nothing ground-breaking at all. One of those knowledge-building situations where it’s like this is what happens when you’re lazy and do it wrong – so don’t. Discovering the uncuttable corners and striding along confidence-paved roads to ignorance-fuelled annoyance. And playing Skyrim on the desktop while the oomphy new laptop chugs away.
