Change daylight to night?

[hiphopcr]

Good question, some of the companies I've worked for have done this in film (Gothika and Mr. and Mrs. Smith come to mind) but I was never a part of the process. The only thing online I could find was http://www.davsys.com/PDF/Day%20for%20Nightfinal.pdf and it's using another piece of software I've never heard of.

What I think, is that it's color correction by the compositor in the post - things like adding blue, and contrast, and tweaking the shadows and highlights. I'd love to find out more I'm kind of intrigued. I'll ask our lead compositor at lunch today.

[DreamingInDigital]

I'd love to find out more I'm kind of intrigued. I'll ask our lead compositor at lunch today.

Did you ask your lead compositor?.....what did he say?........This is a subject that has bewilderd me for quite some time now.....

[dprgb]

Probably the best thing would be to find similar footage to what you're looking for (like a single frame from Cast Away at night) and a similar frame from the day, and analyze what they did to the colors of Tom Hank's skin in highlights, shadows, and midtones (and also the sky and background features).

Then you can color-correct the footage in a compositing program to get this effect. You might have to apply seperate color corrections to different areas of the image, as well as highs/mids/shadows.

This is what secondary color correction is, if you've heard that term. Primary color correction applies to the overall colors in the entire image (like adding a color corrector to the footage and just making the whole thing look more blue), secondary color correction applies to specific colors in the footage. A good plugin for Cumbustion and AE that does secondarys is Color Finesse by Synthetic Aperature.

The more manual way to do it is to create a matte using a keyer, then using that as a matte for the color correction (so only the areas matted are affected by the color corrector).

That other software (Da Vinci) is really made to do only this, and costs quite a lot (if I win the lotto it's one of the things I'm definately buying, until then I'm waiting for Color Finesse 2). Other software like this includes the former Discreet's Lustre, Baselight, Silicon Color's FinalTouch (mac only), Nucoda's Film Master, there's a few more digital intermediate programs but these are some of the big ones. And, all are at least six figures to buy.

[IestynRoberts]

Hi guya many thanks for replying. I've come across Digieffects, Dilirium that does this, i've downloaded the demo but have'nt tried it out as yet.

Hiphopcr: Thanks for the link and the information. Did you ask your lead compositor yesterday? I would really like to hear what he had to say about it.

Dapete: Thank you for the breakdown, it sounds pretty straight forward, but i bet it is'nt going to be. The Plug-ins you listed sounds great i'll have a look at them now.

Cheers for the pointers guys, i hope you will get the time to ask the compositor Hiphopcr.
Iest

[hiphopcr]

Well, our lead compositor is out for the week, so I asked a few of the compositors that did day to night shots on Blade II. Sorry, no tutorial, they gave me the "oh it's just basic color and light theory" answer. Hues, contrast, shadows, highlights. One thing they did mention is that in those shots they had to add light sources (the moon and city lights off in the distance). It's all done 2D. We use Digital Fusion here and the color tools are amazing and very intuitive, but I'm sure the same thing could be accomplished with AE.

The artists here have mad skills and they make things seem like a breeze, but like you said, I'm sure it's more complicated then it sounds.

[IestynRoberts]

Hey Hiphopcr, thanks for getting back in touch, and for asking your compositors. My freind gave it a quick whirl yesterday, fiddling around with Hue, Saturation etc etc, and yeah, its getting there, so it's just basically a whole lot of playing aroung i guess. The demo's i've downloaded are alright, but nothing to write home about, they just trun the shot blue, which is'nt qute the effect we wanted. So it'll just take a bit more of playing around till we get it right. I like the sound of placing lights in the shot in a 2D way, do you know anymore about this? How it culd be done etc?

Thank you very much for your time, if u get anymore knowledge, could you let me know please.
Iest

[Robert Glotzbach]

Hello Iest,

I found your post from a while ago; maybe you solved it allready I don't know.
Anyhow, I don't know which version of AE you have, but if it's 6,5, you also should have Color Finesse 1,5.
It even has a Day to Night preset, maybe you should try that one.

All the best,

Robert

[JoshKirk]

I have a plugin called digital film labs and it has a day to night preset as well, its not great but its something.

[IestynRoberts]

Hello there, thanks for replying. Yeah i think weve got it now thanks, i got Color Finesse 1,5 and tried that, it ws ok, but i think we got better results from playing around with it ourselves. Ill have a look for digital film labs to see what they have to offer.

Again, thanks for your replies guys, much apprichiated.
Iest

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