how to fake a cracked 'camera' lens?

clang

clang

Veteran
I'm working on a project where an animated actor will 'crash' into the camera lens, resulting in subsequent action being shown through a cracked lens.

If this was a live action project, I'd probably experiment with some sort of practical effect with real cracked glass in front of my real camera, but the animation technique will probably make that impractical. So I'm looking at how best to fake it in post, in Vegas 8.

The obvious solution, not that I've done it before, would seem to be multiple tracks, one showing a simple .png of fake cracks, and several others all showing the same video stream but each masked to show only one pretend lens fragment, and each offset slightly so the image will distort across the whole screen. Does that sound practical? I'm not too experienced with masks.

Anyone have any other suggestions?
 
Buy a cheap ND filter and crack it. Screw it on to the camera and shoot everything taking place after the impact, but you have to be careful to not move the camera. But that would have to be done before post.

-Nate
 
>Buy a cheap ND filter and crack it.

That might not work as well if the camera can't focus on it so close. It would look blurry instead.

The best way to do a crack is to use a After Effects and/or Photoshop (starting with an image). Vegas might not have all the needed tools to do that right.
 
Yeah, a blurry crack would be technically correct, but won't make sense to the audience - I need dramatic reality, not real reality :)
 
You likely don't even need to go so far as to use AE, just make an overlay mask in Photoshop or similar, use the Event/Pan Crop to Animate some jarring frames and add Video Blur for a few frames as well. Blur the Mask, too. It shouldn't be sharp in order to sell the effect. If you "pulse" it for a few seconds, it will sell it even more.
 
Try surfing google for any jpeg image u might get that has a broken glass pane.
Preferably high resolution. Take that image into vegas and try using it above the orginal video track using some mixing modes like add, subtract etc. You might find some mode that superimposes the broken glass image in such a way that it looks realistic. Now when you character comes close to the screen and bumps in. The jpeg image starts right there with a cracking noise on another audio track to lend effect. I think something like this should work.
 
@ plainman007, good point, that will give better results than drawing cracked glass by hand. I didn't find anything hi-res enough on Google, but stock.xchng (www.sxc.hu) has a few. Now to work out how to use one as a lumakey/chromakey...

@ armisiano, you're welcome. I also do a lot of prose writing and have found the same thing there - real reality just doesn't seem real :)

No ideas from anyone on distorting the actual underlying video image so that it looks like it's being seen through the broken glass?
 
clang said:
No ideas from anyone on distorting the actual underlying video image so that it looks like it's being seen through the broken glass?
Click to expand...


Assuming there are several major cracks, make a mask for each of those and a separate slight blur for each region, but not too much.

Remember, selling these effects is a lot in what's happening in the story, less is more.

Whatever action is taking place is furthering the story, so it needs to make sense. You want to see what's happening, not obscure it. Nor do you want to draw attention to the effect. It is what it is.

In the end, it would be nice for the audience to think that, "What tough luck to break the lens while making this picture, but you know, it was worth it to make the picture."
 
Mike is right. Dont over do it unless u really want to emphasise on the point about the broken glass. If u really wanna be physically accurate its not impossible,, just a little more work. Also in reality a merely cracked glass pane wont show much of distortion, trust me. But it can be done thru multiple layers of the same clip each having a mask and each having a warp/skew filter from within vegas added to create the distortion. Finally each cracked panel will actually be showing its own individual video layer which has a deform modifier applied to it. Tweak each layer's modifier to simulate each glass piece showing a different angle of disortion.
 
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Keep in mind that youll have many layers,, each with a warp/skew filter (im not sure thats what the filter is called within Vegas) and this will take a long time to render plus you wont get real time previews. You better work on a low profile intermediate to create and work on the effect and then finally render swapping in the orginal footage file.
 
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