The Junior Compositor

5mins 55sec 36meg Quicktime H.264 MOV

Offset tracking?  What about tracking in general, Matt?  Hold your horses and steady on!  I freely admit that this is an old tutorial I did for the University course I taught, so apologies to my previous students . . . please don’t let this make you feel any less special.  You are all unique snowflakes!

Actually the real reason is that upon reflection my original tracking video might raise the ire of Teh Appel Corporation as I used the standard footage provided in the shake tutorial book . . . soooooo, rather than risk a multi-billionaire dollar lawsuit and put Steve Jobs already strained health under more stress, I will look at doing a re-edit with some techniques I learned on ‘Australia’.  

Now, these concepts can be applied to pretty much any compositing software.  As far as I know they all have the ability to offset or append a search region.  Why do we do this?  The main reason is because your main tracking points become obscured or head offscreen.  The thing is, as an aspiring compositor or 3D person, you might not know that this is possible, so you will be fighting your footage trying to get “the perfect track” on a point when it either just can’t be done or you can get a better track quicker and with less time wastage by choosing better tracking data at some point in your clip.

So, without further delay, check it, like, totally out.  As always, comments, questions and additions are welcome.  Only unnecessarily over the top profanity is frowned upon.

Offset tracking. Sexxy, no? No.

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16mins 38secs, 54meg Quicktime mp4 mov

I finally got my desktop fired up and grabbed this video I made last year for class.  I have a 50meg version of this I will try and get up soon if 80meg is too big.  I have used Simon Reeves’ excellent breakdown on his website www.bankaffairs.com.  Check it out for some very clear examples of using RBG passes for compositing in CSI Please note that all images are copyright Simon Reeves and are to be used for education purposes only.  Check out Simon’s main site at www.simonreeves.com.

Note: for clarity (and my own workflow), I have reordered the channels of the RBG passes before feeding them into nodes.  You don’t have to do this in Shake.  In the node being masked you can choose which channel you want to use as the mask.

Images (c) Simon Reeves

9mins 53secs, 24.6meg Quicktime 840×526 h.264 mov

Here is a cool tip that was passed on to me by one of our supervisors on Australia.  The idea is to use a colour lookup curve to shape how the edges of your matte are blurred, pushing the white pixels out to the edge or pulling them back into the core of your matte.

As always, if you have any questions or tips post them here. I would be especially happy if you have your own blog and can show how to replicate these techniques in other software. I just don’t have enough time or knowledge to do the tutorials in each application.

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