3 Practical CGI techniques for low-budget filmmakers

[HughHancock]

(Mods, I'm not sure if linking posts is allowed here - please delete if I'm breaking rules, ofc!)

Thought you guys might be interested to read this post over at Raindance talking about technological advances in CGI these days, and how even micro-budget films can use CGI to do things that just wouldn't be practical any other way:

http://www.raindance.org/3-cost-effective-cgi-techniques/

Full disclosure - I wrote it .

Hope you find it interesting, and please do let me know what you think, if there's anything I've missed, obvious cockups, better tutorial videos, etc, etc

 

[Michael Carter]

I think you nailed it; the only thing lacking is the same thing that's plagued the DSLR revolution - a good eye and planning things within realistic expectations.

It's pretty amazing that AE and C4D are now integrated. But getting great lighting and compositing and tracking is one skill set - modeling and rendering realistically is completely another. Hopefully we'll see more people getting into modeling and rendering at the same level people are getting into DSLR shorts and features.

Being a veteran of plenty of green screen and sky-enhancing and "oops" removing for small-corporate level stuff, I'll say the biggest thing affecting compositing at the guerilla level isn't the software - it's the availability of higher resolution sensors. All of the advances in software over the last 3 or 4 years have been fairly minor (excluding affordable tracking). But having 2.5k, 4k, 4.6K cameras that are supplying full raster vs. 1080 and DSLR pixel-binned, aliased and noised-up "faux-1080" - that's huge for getting a good key. To me even bigger than 4-2-2 vs. 4-2-0. Throw in more robust & less compressed codecs (raw or prores or at least higher bit rate footage) and keys stop being such a hair-pulling fight.

AE's tracking is decent, but I still don't have a full grasp of giving the 3D tracker what it needs. I need to do a lot more tests with tiny fields of dots and scene detail. I've shot things where common sense would say the 3D tracker should eat this footage up - and it's a crappy solve. A forest full of leaves and stuff, yeah. Crazy amounts of boards with varying sizes of dots and crosses? Never quite enough!

More than anything, it still takes a good eye, a good sense of color and lighting, and the ability to light your talent to match your plates and still get a solid key. I think every person wanting to go deeper into this should start with the Mark Christensen AE books. He does a great job of the technology meeting the "art".