Moving car greenscreen

B

Bante

Active member
Hey all! I hope I posted this in the right forum! :)

I have a shot comming up, involving two guys talking in a moving car. We want to shoot this in front of a greenscreen and we did some test yesterday, trying to shoot some background footage of the city passing by the window.

This footage ended up being really shakey, so I wonder what you guys do to minimize the shake? Unfortunatly, I have no access to professional car rigs so I was thinking putting the camera on a wooden board and fastened it between the dashboard and the top of the passenger seat. What do you guys think?


Any help is appriciated!
 
The car greenscreen tutorial on videocopilot is very, very good. Reflections in glass and all to sell the shot.
 
I just watched it. It was really great, but he didn't really get into how he shot the background footage. That's my concern right now. I want to shot the background as steady as possible, so I don't have to spend days and weeks in after effects manually trying to stabilize the footage! :) Any ideas?
 
There are a few different programs or plug ins that will take some of the shake out. 2D3 Steady Move comes with Premiere 2, but is a rather limited freebie.
 
To stabalise video in AE, you simply do a motion track then use an expression to move the frame in the oposite direction to the motion track data.

I'm fairly sure there are some tutorials that show how to do this,

you will of course lose resolution since you will need to zoom into the frame and crop it.
 
Thanks for your ideas, guys!

Yeah, I tried messing around with AE's motion tracking, and I might have to rethink my background footage.

I want a city sidewalk passing by the window which means stuff will be right up close to the car. This means there won't be anything in the far background to track, since everything moves out of frame so fast.

I could of course track stuff in the sidewalk, like a post or a doorknob, and when that point moves out of the frame, I track something else that enters the frame.

I haven't tried 2d3 Steadymove, but I guess it's the same problem when not having proper reference points in the picture.

I tried my wooden board idea today, and it sure made the footage alot smoother. Sometimes tiny jolts show up, but not as frequent before, which saves me alot of AE work.

I'm thinking about making a bigger rig, with one board stretching from drivers side to passenger side AND one board from the dashboard to the backseat. I think the bigger plane I can put the camera on, the smoother it will get, eventhough I'm not sure it will eliminate the jolts alltogether. It's worth a shot, though! :)
 
Hey know this post is like 1.5 years old, but I'm now doing the same thing.
To minimize shake we stuck a low height tripod into the back of my hatchback car and opened the trunk. Also make sure to be zoomed all the way out. Any zooming will greatly ampifly the shake.

then drive on a straight and smooth as possible road you can find. driving faster also smooths shake out more than slower. Our shake is minimal and needed no stablizing in post.
 
great tips!

I might as well share how we did it.

We strapped on a big peice of plywood on the roof, and then bolted a camera mount to it,. You might think the height of the camera would be a problem in the shoot, but it actually worked really good. I shoot 1080 so I could move the footage to where I needed it to be.

I could pretty easily get all the angles I needed by just relocating it with four screws. It was pretty stable except for some small vibrations so in some shoot I had to manually track the footage to smooth it out.

I guess it must have been a funny sight, me driving around town with my camera slapped on the roof. People must have thought I've forgot it there :D
 
To minimize shake we stuck a low height tripod into the back of my hatchback car and opened the trunk. Also make sure to be zoomed all the way out. Any zooming will greatly ampifly the shake.

then drive on a straight and smooth as possible road you can find. driving faster also smooths shake out more than slower. Our shake is minimal and needed no stablizing in post.
Click to expand...
That's exactly what I did on my current film. Then I just cropped it and saved a preset for the two close ups and used the full shot for the two shot.
 
I am doing a small scene in a RHD car, we have a camera in the bottom corner of the windshield on the passenger side, facing the driver, all you can see is the driver and the visible part of his side window.How would I do this ?
 
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