Faux Depth Of Field With DVX100A And Commotion 4.1

Jonathan_Healey

Jonathan_Healey

Well-known member
Being that I don't own a 35mm adapter or lenses for my DVX100, I recently had to rotoscope footage in order to achieve the DOF I was looking for. I made several attempts to defocus the background in-camera; however, the small size of the room wouldn't allow for us to achieve this. I used Commotion 4.1 to rotospline the subject (Warren Haynes) and applied Image Lounge's TrueCamera Blur to the background. The footage was imported into Final Cut Pro for color correction and I used to a mask and some feathering to create a vignette look. This footage is Warren Haynes giving a by-way-of-video acceptance speech. We did this as a favor after our interview but it was a nice clip to use to test this technique:

Faux-DOF Clip

Moving forward I think I'm going to look into a 35mm adapter.
 
Hey good work jon normally this kind of stuff doesn't look good but you did a great job and a technique perfect for this kind of the situation good work on the lighting aswell. This is the kind of shot where you wouldn't pick up on the post work which is great very pro looking
 
Damn, man. It looks great! I'd say it looks more filmic than most SLR adapter footage I've, but I'm not really a fan of SLR adapter stuff.

Awesome work, the tediousness paid off for sure.
 
Very nice looking, looks completely real, with a nice cozy glow to it. Haven't seen this good fake dof in a while.

Now do something handheld! ;)
 
Thanks.

My DVX100 was stolen recently so I used a rental from LVR. When I rent I generally hit the reset button first to restore the factory presets. I didn't not alter these presets and I set the camera to 24p (F5) at 29.97. When I got home I forgot the rest of our interviews were at 23.98 so I used Cinema Tools to do a Reverse Telecine.

I think we're going to apply this to the other interviews we shot as well. So to the person who requested handheld rotoscoping... Well... There will be some moving hands in frame. Ha! I'll post more over the next couple weeks.

Lighting: 1 ARRI 650 Plus with a medium sized Chimera and 1 ARRI 300 backlight. The 650 was dimmed maybe 50-70%
 
I thought it looked great. It kind of looks like those MTV Real World interviews which I think are shot on green screen, then out of focus backgrounds are put in later. Might be an easier way to acheive the same effect next time. But yeah, I think doing out of focus in post is more trouble than it's worth. How did your DVX get stolen? Any lesson learned you can pass on so we don't lose our cameras as well?
 
Jonathan_Healey said:
When I rent I generally hit the reset button first to restore the factory presets.
Click to expand...

The reset button doesn't reset your settings back to factory. It leave's them alone... so you may have shot this under someone else's settings ;)

either way, it looked good.

Warren Haynes is the man! His guest appearance with Dave Matthews in N.Y. was excellent.

-brown
 
I really liked the look.

It didn't look totally real in terms of things further away looking even more out of focus, but I think it does what it needs to do - draw your attention to the in focus area.

Even though it has a different quality to real optical DOF, it has lots of control and color options and I just plain think it looks cool in it's own way.

I am definatly going to give this a go.

Thanks for posting!
 
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