(Humor) Here's an OLPC ad that never was: http://www.ucbcomedy.com/videos/play/5674

Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot (a sort of demo-reel): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k&feature=player_embedded

Basically a small glimpse at how prevalent chroma-keyed footage is used in your average TV program, even for shots you may have thought otherwise simple/normal.

Yeah, I saw that a few weeks ago. It's incredible how much of that is in your typical TV show. The thing that strikes me about that is how there are several of those instances where I don't really understand why they had to do that stuff. Instances where it seems like they could have just found a street or something. I guess getting location approvals is expensive.

I watched some of the other Stargate Studio clips. At first I was going "Hey I remember all those, but then wait a minute, I don't remember that one or that one... Then I figured it out, they were clips from never to be finished episodes of canceled shows.

I am so much more disgusted with the execs that made those decisions than I was a moment ago.

I had no idea that VFX were used so much in "simple" street level scenes ! Lots of those scenes I have seen and I have never spotted that they were effects shots.

So, why when I watch a typical modern movie are most of the VFX shots obvious and distracting ?

I'm not sure what you mean. I only picked out a few shows from that clip that have been canceled:

Ugly Betty - I could care less, I guess it dropped severely in popularity

Trauma - ill conceived to begin with. was an obvious replacement for ER, but nobody wanted that.

Eli Stone - I quite liked it, but I guess nobody else did, and the clip they used was in the very first episode, not an unaired one.

Heroes - probably should be cancelled


I didn't see many others, and the ones that I didn't recognize didn't look like series I'd care much for anyway.

It probably depends on the type of effect. Most of the ones shown in the video could just be normal filmed material overlaid into the appropriate places. IE, someone went and filmed a real street, then brought the footage back to build the set and place the green markers in appropriate places. Touching up/editing real video keeps a realistic feeling to it. The advantage here is they can film the street in ideal lighting/weather conditions, and still be able to film as many takes as necessary indoors, without worrying about continuity issues from sunlight position and such.

Most movies are going beyond this and creating their own scenes purely in a computer, so at that point it comes down to the quality of the artists and effects studios used. Making 3D things is easy. Making 3D things that look real and natural is much harder.

It probably comes down to scheduling. TV Shows are going to be under tighter time constraints to get things out, so they don't have time to wait for entire scenes to be created from scratch. Movies have plenty of time, and in some cases the actors filmed their performances years before a movies release.

That's just it. For every obvious and distracting effects shot that you notice, there are probably ten others you didn't notice.

Or in the case of the Star Wars prequels, 1000 other shots you did notice.

For instance, Avatar makes the Star Wars prequels look like the 1970's Sinbad movies.

The thing that impresses me more than the motion stuff is the quality of the keyers they use. The lack of fringing and tinting is really quite good.

Not terrible, but also not terribly convincing comps.

Of course, it's not like they're using the chroma key feature on a video switcher. They're shooting in high def and/or using high resolution film, and then applying some pretty awesome software compositing tools to the problem. These days, the tools are getting quite advanced, being able to do things like resolve fine filigree objects, hair blowing in the wind, or even the transparency of smoke or water. They can anti-alias and get graduated transitions that look entirely convincing. Ever play with a Photoshop plug-in called Corel Knock Out? It's like the movie equivalent of that.

Something in particular I noticed about that demo reel, something that really helped sell the shots, was that many of the shots were outdoor shots. In other words, with only a few exceptions, if the scene was an outdoor scene, then it was actually shot outdoors with proper outdoor lighting.

I think that, as jaded viewers, we've come to recognize a chroma key shot any time we see an outdoor scene where the foreground actors are obviously being lit by indoor lighting. By making sure the outdoor shots are actually filmed outdoors, it takes away the single biggest problem that made our eyes recognize it as an effects shot.

There's other lighting tricks they can use to help the chroma key software. A big one is to hit the actors with a faint key light from behind (ie, the light shines from the approximate location of the green screen itself), and have the key light's color be exactly 180 degrees opposite the color of the green screen (ie, orange or red). This helps reduce the "green bounce" on the actors and makes the keying process more accurate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1JZ9O15280

Cheers

Cris.

What do they say about teaching grandmothers to suck eggs? I was impressed because I know first-hand how difficult it can be to get a good key sometimes.

IMHO, the key (pardon the pun) to getting a good key is not to subsample your chroma. You can do what you like with lighting and software tweaks but if you've started throwing colour information away before it's even left the camera, you've already lost the battle.

Defying Gravity had a lot of shots. Trauma had some that never made it into the show. Those are the ones I recall specifically.

Want to see a TERRIBLE pilot?

David Krumholtz must be quite happy this turd never aired.

Thread continued in Best Videos 2010