London City
This term, Gonzalo assigned us to create a video by compositing stock footage onto the provided video. He limited the material to stock footage, not allowing us to use CG renders made by ourselves, which made it a bit challenging to achieve a natural outcome without CG elements. I used some downloaded footage along with the materials Gonzalo provided.
Before starting the compositing process, I created a rough layout on a still frame of the background. I wanted to practice compositing fire footage, so I added fires in the foreground. Then, I added more elements like explosions, cracks, and smoke in the background. At this stage, Gonzalo advised me to stack the footage with the furthest element at the top of the node tree. Keeping his advice in mind, I finished setting up the layout.
After the layout stage, I started to composite the elements one by one. Since I selected various types of footage, it was a great opportunity to practice combining everything to achieve a natural look. In the first feedback from Gonzalo, he advised me to match the saturation and brightness of the footage to the background. The further an element is, the more desaturated it should be, so I matched the saturation accordingly. The technique I learned for treating smoke footage—blurring the background footage, converting it into YCbCr, merging it into the green/blue channel, and converting it back into linear—was helpful for matching the colors.
In the case of the fire on the car, the tracker didn’t work well, but since the scene was very short, I decided to track it manually. It didn’t take much time because it was only about 40 frames. While compositing this part, I encountered an issue where the MotionBlur node caused some distortion in the position. Gonzalo helped me find the solution: the Tracker node has its own motion blur knob, but I hadn’t set the motion blur and shutter options. I had placed the MotionBlur node under the Tracker, which created multiple motion blur and caused the position to shift. I fixed it by removing MotionBlur node and adjusting the settings in the Transform tab of the Tracker node.
This is the final outcome of this London city project. It was really helpful to practice compositing various footage and review the techniques I learned in previous classes.