Recently, we had to work with several interlaced broadcast quality commercials, so we looked to one of Andrew Kramer’s classic tutorials on how to deinterlace videos. The technique requires you to use an image of black and white lines as an Luma matte in After Effects to remove every other line in the picture, then use Directional blur to fill in the empty lines. View full article »
For our current project we are designing and coding a laboratory themed microsite in Flash. The site requires programming lots of gadgety gizmos, one of which is a counter with a number scrambler before the counter finishes “computing” to display the final number or message. View full article »
Whenever hair is involved, compositing a video is tough. Masking it out to place over a new background is a tricky job, even if the footage was shot on a green screen. Simply keying the green isn’t enough. It will inevitably take away too much of the ends of hair, leaving the chunky head looking matted down. That’s why it’s so important to keep the feathery edges and blend them with the background. Learn how in this tutorial. I’ll show you some simple tricks in After Effects to composite a “hairy” subject onto a new scene. View full article »
For our KissMein3D shoot we filmed our two alluring actors with the stereo camera. Each “eye” was coded to its corresponding anaglyph colors, then merged into one video. The specific anaglyphic (two color 3D effect) process we used to create the blue and amber 3D effect is a highly complicated procedure involving plutonium and space dust, and secrets of which we can’t give away. It’s pretty much voodoo magic. However, we can show you View full article »
The holographic effects in “Social Networking”, the third video in our Adobe Open Screen Project series, involved two scenes that required superimposing graphic objects over live-action footage. The plan was to insert a semi-transparent newspaper over the bendable screen in the cafe scene, and a 3D animated video game racetrack onto a table in the final scene. Both instances were filmed with 3D camera movements and therefore the 3D assets had to motion match to the video. To do that we tracked the footage using SynthEyes. View full article »
Turf Round 2
In the previous blog post, we gave you the background to our character designs in Turf plus a few technical details on how we modeled them in Cinema 4D. Now let’s dive further into C4D and discuss a few issues we had with animation. We tackled a few challenges with motion, fracture effects, HAIR, and rendering time and we will now give you a technical run through on all that wholesome, 3D good stuff. View full article »
