New C4D based music vid

[Neil V]

Very nice work Basilisk. You can see immediately how much work, effort and skill have gone intro producing it. Great stuff. Quite like the song too!

[Katachi]

Great Work! I love the video and I love the song! What´s the name of the band? there are some visible flaws mostly the composition of the live footage but overall a very stylish work. :)

[Joseppi]

Great work! Did you do all the set design and art direction? Nice retro lounge-look. How much was done in Cinema with mapped cards, and how much composited (3D space in AE?). Or did you do it all in C4D?

Joe

[basilisk]

Great Work! I love the video and I love the song! What´s the name of the band? there are some visible flaws mostly the composition of the live footage but overall a very stylish work. :)

Thanks guys. The band is called Ivory Circus, and they are pretty new and I hope they will go far. I wouldn't have put the effort in on a bad song! It is pretty much just a portfolio piece, though we may get royalties if the song or video do well!

I did a lot of work trying to clean up the compositing, but the DV footage was disappointing, so it was never going to be super clean.

[basilisk]

Great work! Did you do all the set design and art direction? Nice retro lounge-look. How much was done in Cinema with mapped cards, and how much composited (3D space in AE?). Or did you do it all in C4D?

Joe

We (me and the wife) were given complete freedom to take it where we wanted design and story-wise. The shots are a complete mix - the interior shots with camera moves are full C4D renders, with camera imported into AE. Most the realistic props are images mapped onto planes or simple geometry. The padded walls use SPD. The closeup shots with small camera moves are mostly faked in AE with a still in the backgound.
In total there were around 20 C4D shots imported to AE.

[robotbob]

dude well done !

poor mans blue screen is a tough nut to crack.

are you using AE keylight ? what you could try is create mattes and then shrink them then feather them by a pixel or so thats has helped me before when edges have been hard or chunky . and grading is absolutly critical to fix a difficult key - i would suggest boost the midtone/highlight reds on the band guys in the red room to blend them in more.

camera moves look great. track is excellent, sets are really good , my favourite is the brown TV room.

p

[Zendorf]

Good job on the vid Basilisk! I have also done quite a few low/no budget videos for bands and I feel your pain with the DV keying. The DV Matte Pro does the best job of DV keying in my opinion, but it is still horrible to work with . I also would never do it again:scream:

My fave shot was the one circling the singer while he was on the couch. Did you track this with Syntheyes or similar?

[basilisk]

Good job on the vid Basilisk! I have also done quite a few low/no budget videos for bands and I feel your pain with the DV keying. The DV Matte Pro does the best job of DV keying in my opinion, but it is still horrible to work with . I also would never do it again:scream:
I used Keylight which seemed to do a fairly good job considering the footage - the Canon XL1S just seemed to produce very soft and noisy results (though we weren't familiar with the camera, so maybe it was our fault) and we used a blue background, because it was free, but it was darker than a greenscreen, so in shadow it looked black and didn't seem to produce enough colour to key well.
I have now found someone who does a reasonable rate for a Panasonic HVX200, so I hope this never arises again.
My fave shot was the one circling the singer while he was on the couch. Did you track this with Syntheyes or similar?
No the camera was fixed, and the chair and singer were on a turntable. I filmed a complete rotation, and then time-remapped it by eye, to match up with the virtual camera moving around it. Apart from a couple of shots the camera stayed on the tripod, and it didn't move!

[interactiveBoy]

nicely done! dancing DV mattes aside, this was a nice little vid. good work.

Gary

[Joseppi]

....snip...No the camera was fixed, and the chair and singer were on a turntable. I filmed a complete rotation, and then time-remapped it by eye, to match up with the virtual camera moving around it. Apart from a couple of shots the camera stayed on the tripod, and it didn't move!

Creative mix of techniques! Yes, keying DV isn't the ideal... But I would mention if you watch Speilberg's War of the Worlds, when Cruise is running through the streets when the first walker attacks, that whole sequence has very soft matte lines around the foreground people. They probably shot it handheld with little greenscreen, and had the FX people rototscope out the edges to insert backgrounds. In any event, those are the most noticable soft mattes I've seen in a long time, maybe ever. So even big budget films balance absolute perfection with whats functional and gets the secquence done.

Chromakeying is it's own art, and you learned things that will help out next time. Overall, great total package!

Joe

[basilisk]

Yes, keying DV isn't the ideal... Chromakeying is it's own art, and you learned things that will help out next time.
Joe

Yep - a job that we did for Virgin Media in the middle of doing the Music Vid - we shot on Varicam in a proper studio. The problem there was that everything was green, floor, back and side walls upto about 20 ft, so avoiding green reflections or sheens on fuzzy materials was almost impossible. But otherwise the keying was pretty straightforward.

http://basilisk.co.uk/motiongraphics/VMS3.mov

[Joseppi]

Yep - a job that we did for Virgin Media in the middle of doing the Music Vid - we shot on Varicam in a proper studio. The problem there was that everything was green, floor, back and side walls upto about 20 ft, so avoiding green reflections or sheens on fuzzy materials was almost impossible. But otherwise the keying was pretty straightforward.

http://basilisk.co.uk/motiongraphics/VMS3.mov

Very nice! The keying around the hair espeically was very good (the Varicam made a big difference. Did you shoot progressive which help keying over interlaced?).

I see what you mean about the slight green influence on some objects (mainly because I was looking for it... average viewer/viewings probably wouldn't scrutinize so much.)

I read that a magenta rim light angled behind subjects can help neutralize the green spill...

Check out this discussion on Blue/Green screen and spill supression:
www.cinematography.net/Pages%20GB/CML%20Blue%20Screen%20vs%20Green%20screen.htm

>>some DPs will gel the subject key and fill magenta/85, in order to seperate the subject from the background more, and then the color cast is corrected in the compositing process.>>

Although posts in that thread said Ulitmatte or Primatte works better without the rim light...

Joe

[aquastealth]

Great work!
Really cool video yet so clean/simple
Song reminds me a little bit of "The Strokes"

[basilisk]

Very nice! The keying around the hair espeically was very good (the Varicam made a big difference. Did you shoot progressive which help keying over interlaced?).
I see what you mean about the slight green influence on some objects (mainly because I was looking for it... average viewer/viewings probably wouldn't scrutinize so much.)
I read that a magenta rim light angled behind subjects can help neutralize the green spill...
Joe
On the Virgin Media project the Varicam was mostly good, though we had backfocus problems on the lens which meant some of the footage was a bit soft - it shows more in the HD version. We shot 720p/25 and worked with the footage in DVCPRO HD
We used a bit of backlighting, with a straw coloured gel (I can't remember where I read that tip). The magenta backlight sounds interesting, though you wouldn't necessarily want magenta highlights on the edges of some things! Interestingly it was the red objects where the spill was most noticeable, e.g. the slightly furry red armchair. I couldn't really colour correct it because, although it looks green, in fact the green light mixing with the red makes a sort of dirty grey colour with no colour value at all. If I had time I could have roto'd some red paint strokes over the edges set to colour mode.
EDIT: just read through that thread about chromakeying. Quite entertaining because just about everyone has a different opinion!

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