Blues for a crappy chroma key

[dlevanchuk]

This last week was a terrible nightmare and I ve learned a ton ton TON about chroma screen shoot!

Here is the "almost" original frame grab.

"Almost" is because I ve already adjusted the green screen (GS) Original footage had a GS filled with wrinkles.
*Even though I was able to apply different color keys in After Effects, as you can see there are still dark lines on the screen.
Another issue is an undersized greenscreen. It would not be that big of an issue I the camera was stationary, because then I can create several masks and animate them.. But since I've used only what I ve had (which is a medium sized green sheet) - I was aware of the painful edit that was yet to come.
I ve tried to key out sky, but then the footage suffered some major color damage. I ve tried masking out the actor but the masks were cutting out the motion blur (footage was shot at 24fps and 1/48 shutter) because on top of fast moving actor I was moving the camera as well.
Total edited scene length was little over a minute and I had to finish editing this scene in 6 days. The only choice I ve had was to export the footage into JPEG cut by cut and do manual replacement of the sky and the house of the left..*
Total scene length is about a minute and a half.. That makes about 2000 frames that needed to be adjusted. By hand. Frame by frame.. By frame.. By frame lol
Each frame was taking about 2 minutes to fix. Which is not a big deal. But the approximate time that was spend fixing the footage was about 66 hours. Select, cut, replace, enter, save. Select cut replace enter save. Select it replace enter save....*

Anyways! In the end u would get a neat clean looking shot like this*

After I got the clean frame- it was a smooth ride from there. Adding a sky, rain, some lighting, color correction and boom!*

It's truly rewarding to see the end product of edited footage an I can't wait to be done with this film for all of you to see.
This has been definitely the most cgi demanding shoot and I ve learned so much!*
Of course, I ve read a ton of material on how to shoot and edit chroma key footage I had to get out there and spill my blood and tears in order to understand the basics of chroma key shoot!

I'm sure there was some better way of Doing this but I was under self imposed deadline, and didn't want to spend time doing a painful research on how to fix crappy chroma key footage. Plus I had to learn the nuts and bolts of what happens when the computer replaces the magic background

Anyways, I'm keeping project updates on our Facebook film fan page Facebook.com/battleofthepacific
Make sure to stop by and hit LIKE on our page!

 

[Jooble]

Hey, I wanted to reply to this yesterday but my account was playing up

I dunno if this is a slap comp so far or the final product. But what I saw on the vimeo page looked pretty good tbh. I have seen far far far worse comps using green screen. But you can get away with more with it being dark, bloomy and blurry .

I thought the shot in the photo needed some work on the axe because that was looking choppy around the edges to me. Like i say the rest is dark so its hard to see clear edges. Are you using one key for the whole thing? It could be worth creating a mask and doing a key just on the axe as doing one key for all pretty much never works.

As others said you could use a light wrap but be careful about how much you use it because its pretty unmotivated when its dark lol. I would use it as a cheat to hide the problems as a last resort if i couldn't fix them.

finally this is some feedback related to the comp not the key. I thought that the sea was perhaps to sharp, I think it needs some dof in there even if its just a blur so it separates the focus, FG vs BG. Finally the character was too red, as its dark he needs to be desaturated and graded towards blue a bit. Will make him blend in nicely, it can sometimes help to look at RGB channels individually to do this (in this case blue channel). Any way you may know all this already but its looking good. Keep it up!

 

[dlevanchuk]

Thanks for the feedback, jooble! I ll be looking over the composition within a couple of days. Just gotta unwind my brain from the last weeks 60 hour edit marathon haha

I ll try out creating multiple keys and see what I can come up with.

Again, thank you for checking the video out!

 

[wheatgrinder]

hey, I get say its epic! First this time!

 

[Dreadylocks]

I watched the footage you posted yesterday. It looks really amazing! You could probably tweak it to make it absolutely perfect, but as is, you're really selling it, esp. once you get some sound in there.

Nice job!

 

[Zensteve]

Looks very legit.

Needs moar sea monster!

 

[dlevanchuk]

Oh the sea monster is slowly making it headway towards the screen!

Yesterday I had a quick phone conference with my monster-making team, going over some texture tweaks , animation and some mesmerizing camera movements. Can't wait to get the final product!


Dreadylock's: for sound I was talking to my audio guy to see if we can go out to the pacific coast (3 hour drive) and record some booming sounds of the ocean. It's going to be flipping amazing. My goal is to make the viewer to get the viewer as close as possible to the scene, to the point of getting the eyeballs wet! Hence the water drops on the lens