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Filed under: Cameras •Editing •Lighting •Post Production •Production •Visual Effects •

I Decide: Anatomy of a No-Budget HD Spot

I worked with my friend Craig Thomas, a 3D animator and editor, to finish the project in After Effects. Craig is a wizard at compositing with Keylight, After Effect’s built-in keyer, but we ran into some issues with the HPX-500’s uprez’ing. The HPX-500 chip is not native DVCProHD size (720x960) so it uprez’s the chip’s image to HD sizes. In the process it has to make up information to fill in the gaps created by adding new pixels, and we discovered that the best way to expose this flaw was to try to create a green screen matte.

Here’s an example of what we saw:

As you can see, Austin’s ears are going to be a compositing problem. We also had a lot of trouble with Catherine’s hair.

There’s a technique I’ve played with in Photoshop that mirrors a rumor I heard about years ago in LA: word had it that when director David Fincher did a music video he sat in on the telecine session and had two passes transferred, one in focus and one out of focus. He then laid the sharp image on top of the soft one and made it partially transparent. The combination of sharp and soft can be a bit magical, and I’ve played with this trick a number of times on still images in Photoshop. I wondered if it might help me out in this case as I desperately needed to smooth over some harsh matte edges.

Here’s what I did in After Effects, with Craig’s help:

And here’s what it looked like, step by step. This is the “raw” green screen image:

For the bottom layer we created the key (shown here with white; I’m not going to try to reproduce Craig’s beautiful color grad) and blurred the image slightly using the Gaussian Blur filter:

Then I worked on the second layer, first by desaturating it:

And then clipping the flesh tones using Curves:

Here’s what the Curves window looked like when I reproduced this look in Photoshop:

And the final comp, with the blown-out black-and-white image placed over the blurred color image with 50% opacity, looks like this:

There’s something very pretty and delicate about desaturating colors this way. For me, half-saturated colors impart the feeling of a watercolor painting or a 30-year-old color transparency. On a practical level it blurred the key enough that blocky edges weren’t as noticeable in the NTSC version of this spot.

We mixed the audio using a music loop from Garage Band (I told you this was a no-budget spot!) and off it went. (We didn’t compress it for the web. That was handled elsewhere.)

I’ve got some RED spots that I hope to write about shortly; meanwhile, thanks for reading the article and please, if you live in California, vote NO on Prop 8!

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