How to do invisible cuts

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24fps4ever

Well-known member
you know I have been hearing a lot about children of men and how it had invisible cuts, the film irreversible too I was researching it and they said that it had invisible cuts in those 10-12 minute uncut segments, and wow you wanna talk about a film that gets under your skin... what I want to know is how do they do this in their NLE has anyone here done an ivisible cut in their films? I am real curious as how this is done
 
Oh please...you don't need CGI for this stuff. You just need to shoot in a way that will facilitate the cut. Dollying behind one thing and dollying out from another, basically. Doubtless you can sometimes smooth it out with CGI though, and there are other ways to do it, but it's doable on a low budget.
 
no no I am talking about the cuts that are imposible to see, where there are no dolly shots and no trees to make a transition to make it seem as its one shot, those are easy, I am talking about the hard ones that no one notices
 
I guess it would have to be CGI...but I haven't seen either of those films. Any other examples? I know the third fast and the furious used CGI cuts, but they were easy enough to spot.
 
Yeah, it's not a matter of your NLE, it's a matter of matching the two shots you're cutting together.

24fps4ever said:
no no I am talking about the cuts that are imposible to see, where there are no dolly shots and no trees to make a transition to make it seem as its one shot, those are easy, I am talking about the hard ones that no one notices
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The thing about Cuaron's style is that the camera is always moving, it would be very simple to choose a moment when the camera is in motion and cut to another take of the camera moving. The motion continuing across the cut will make it seem continuous. Also, they probably didn't make hard cuts, but small dissolves three or four frames long.

I don't think they were CG intensive in the sense of 3D rendered elements, but there was certainly some compositing done to help massage the cuts. Certainly in the car scene there was some work done to hide the transitions between takes (seamless in the end), and no doubt they had to do some tracking and stabilization to match two cuts together in the handheld battle sequence so that you wouldn't notice when they transitioned.

The only invisible cut I know the location of for sure takes place just after Theo enters the building during the battle scene. The camera whip-pans upward (I guess that's technically a whip-tilt) and when it comes to rest, the blood on the lens is gone. It's things like that you have to build into your cinematography, so that there's not enough detail to focus on and you can make your cut (or four-frame dissolve) invisibly.

In the several-minute title sequence to Serenity, Captain Reynolds travels from the cockpit to the cargo hold, which is essentially the entire ship except for the bunks. The ship, however, is split between two soundstages, and the transition between the two is also masked with a whip-pan.
 
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whip pan means what exactly? "a too fast for your eyes tilt" ?
so let me get this straight in order to put two scenes together to make it look like one shot is to match the last shot with the next as far as everything has to be positioned exactly as the last shot and the camera has to be at the same exact hight and lattitude, more of a math equation is that right?
 
24fps4ever said:
so let me get this straight in order to put two scenes together to make it look like one shot is to match the last shot with the next as far as everything has to be positioned exactly as the last shot and the camera has to be at the same exact hight and lattitude, more of a math equation is that right?
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Well, that's the easiest way to do it, but also the least interesting.

If, say, your shot is handheld as it is in Children of Men's battle scene, you would get as close as you can and then use a compositing program like After Effects, Shake, or Inferno to match and blend them.
 
ohhh ok I see now, have you personaly done one? I would really like to see something someone did from dvxuser that used the no cut look technique
 
DorkmanScott said:
The only invisible cut I know the location of for sure takes place just after Theo enters the building during the battle scene. The camera whip-pans upward (I guess that's technically a whip-tilt) and when it comes to rest, the blood on the lens is gone.
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Not trying to incite an argument and get off topic, but that part was rotoscoped to get the blood off.
 
BryantStanton said:
Not trying to incite an argument and get off topic, but that part was rotoscoped to get the blood off.
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That would require a LOT of paint and roto seeing as how the shot continues for another 2 or 3 minutes afterward. Do you have a source on that?
 
Zak Forsman said:
the combat scene was one unbroken take, with digital removal of the blood. if you watch the part where the camera tilts up with a keen eye, the blood "melts" away over several seconds. a cut was not hidden in a whip pan.
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I noticed that, I just chalked it up to a dissolve between cuts as I mentioned above.

The Article said:
Keen-eyed moviegoers can be forgiven for thinking there's an invisible cut somewhere in those nine minutes. After all, at the end of the scene, the blood on the lens has vanished.
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So there! :laugh:

The Article said:
Well, not really. "The blood was great, but after a while it started to feel like it was on your face," Cuarón says. "It started to feel distracting." So he hired a computer-effects artist to digitally erase the blood from the final image, a very painstaking job.

"It was the biggest nightmare on planet Earth," he says, "and apparently she hated us every single second."
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No kidding. Jesus.
 
I guess it's already been proven via those sources above, but I was going to say that I heard a radio interview and read an interview with Cuaron that mentioned the rotoscoping bit.
 
BryantStanton said:
I guess it's already been proven via those sources above, but I was going to say that I heard a radio interview and read an interview with Cuaron that mentioned the rotoscoping bit.
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I suppose that's what he meant in the sense that each frame had to be manipulated effectively by hand which is a distinctive feature of rotoscoping.
 
A full 400ft of 35mm runs for approx 4.5 mins so in a 10 min take there only really needs to be one cut. In Children of Men when theo runs through that battle scene there is an invisible cut (as in the camera moves to black then comes out of it, aided by a little compositing magic) as Theo enters the building. I think the blood on the lens is actually CGI it dosnt really dissapear as dissolves when the camera pans up and the camera dosn't whip fast enough, due to the immense detail of 35, to actually be able to cut between the takes without extensive frame matching and compositing.

"Scrubs" is a great show for invisible cuts they use whips and moves to black constantly to seamlessly cut between scenes
 
Mutoscope said:
A full 400ft of 35mm runs for approx 4.5 mins so in a 10 min take there only really needs to be one cut. In Children of Men when theo runs through that battle scene there is an invisible cut (as in the camera moves to black then comes out of it, aided by a little compositing magic) as Theo enters the building. I think the blood on the lens is actually CGI it dosnt really dissapear as dissolves when the camera pans up and the camera dosn't whip fast enough, due to the immense detail of 35, to actually be able to cut between the takes without extensive frame matching and compositing.

"Scrubs" is a great show for invisible cuts they use whips and moves to black constantly to seamlessly cut between scenes
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No, the blood was an accident that they thought had spoiled their best take, but they were able to remove it digitally. I've read interviews where they said for a fact that the battle scene was a single take. They recorded it 3 or 4 times or something like that, and they took the last take.

I'm not sure about the car scene. I know that a lot of the stuff going on in that shot is CGI, so it would not be quite as hard to do in a single take as it seems at first.

The one invisible cut that I know for a fact exists in the movie is during the birthing scene. They set Kee down on the bed, and the shot pans over to the door with the other two people. The shot cuts by the door, so that they can set up prosthetic legs for the birth part.




Invisible cuts would be incredibly hard to achieve without careful planning ahead, or the use of complex computer controlled camera moves, unless you want to consider semi-visible cuts.

The way I would try an invisible cut is parking the camera so that it's only facing scenery, and being very careful to not move it between shots. As long as you're careful not to move the lights or anything, it should look fairly seemless.
 
ok. I'm not aware of these invisible cuts, but just so you know. I was doing some test shots with my best friend. we were CU on his face as he was acting like he was falling asleep. I shot 5 seconds before he moved his head and faced the camera, then went back to about the same position. (maybe a few inches off and his hand was on his face as before, but his fingers had moved downward)
So I cut out the part that he looked at the camera, and spliced in with a fade in transition the next segment. it looked like he was falling asleep and his hand moved down a little. at first I played it and no one noticed it. then I told them to look for it, and the second time, I couldn't even catch it.
voila, my invisible cut. :)
 
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