VFX Challenge Series 3 Q&A Thread

[ShadowMaker SdR]

I still have the feeling it hasn't come across completely - although I could be wrong - the NEW brief is: make a teaser and most people seem to have gone all out and built some transformers, but most teasers only have either text, or a couple of *eh* teasershots in them, not fullblown rendered shots.
If you take a look at the original Transformer teaser, you only see shadows and a backlit silhouet of a Robot. Cool. Menacing. But not very clear.
IMO teasers are meant to tell a short 'story' to wet people's appetites.
But there are still a couple of days left - so let's see what people come up with.

[JesterJJZ]

So when is the actual cutoff tomorrow? As in what time? Or is it by midnight or something?

[grooove]

Well, i think everybody feels excited by having the opportunity to make a real render and a finished shot, at least I do.. by just making a teaser with concept ideas, i see it by not exploring all the possibilities and not taking the most of us.. and I think the main point of this contents is to be resourcefull, and push our creativity and skills to the next level..

sorry for my weak english

[ShadowMaker SdR]

Grooove, I wasn't talking about making a teaser of what you would like to do for the challenge. I meant that for films there are teasers and trailers. And the challenge for this month is to make a 'teaser' for 'Transformers'

Teasers are made many months (sometimes years) before a movie is released (sometimes they haven't even started filming yet) and are meant to raise the awareness of an upcoming movie. Sometimes they're just title cards, sometimes they're shots that don't mean anything. They usually don't have dialogue or shots from the actual film.

Trailers are usually cut when the shooting of a movie is finished and editing has already begun. They are meant to help sell the actual movie. They'll have actual shots in them from the movie, with a voice over and usually much more of the storyline is revealed. Check out the trailer section at apple.com to learn more about the difference.

[Rafs Ome]

sorry for the stupid q- but where is this greenscreen billboard?

at last a compositing job! lets see a freak model the inside of this room and project it - haha

[Djiinn]

Hi Rafs,
I assume the greenscreen billborad is the green square they're using in the footage behind the character - you can find this footage here

[ShadowMaker SdR]

Well since I'm the one who shot the footage to begin with (it's also me in the footage BTW all be it in 2000 or something like that) I can tell that the only reason the green was there originally, is that I thought it might be helpful for extracting myself out of the scene. Although of course you can use it to put an 'I love VFXTalk' image in there!

[Rafs Ome]

Hi Rafs,
I assume the greenscreen billborad is the green square they're using in the footage behind the character - you can find this footage here

HaHa. I thought bill-board refered to a advertizing cornerpin job in the bg(that i couldn't see).

[pingking]

the greatest challenge on this one will be to deliver something that will stand out from the other, because put 5x shadowmaker in the room is a bit of work and lots of roto but we will end up all with nearly the same

[ShadowMaker SdR]

That sort of was the idea this time - at least as far as I'm concerned - because this way we can also judge on objective merits this time, not just the whizz bang qualities that make sloppier work stand out because of it's great ideas. On the other hand it's up to you how to integrate me in those shots. You can do a wide view panorama (although you will get in trouble with some of the source footage) or you can do a fake pan. You can put an alien on the couch next to me - there are ways to stand out, they're just more subtle this time.

[Stringkeeper]

One - perhaps strange- question? Why ist everybody using quicktime here? I do not have a lot of experience with it. Do we have MAC-only users here? If I post avi with xvid, are you able to open them?

[bartrobinson]

What format is the source material and has anything been done with it when encoding it to Quicktime frame/field wise? I ask because my DFX+ or (or anything else for that matter) gets real pissed off (aka wavey distortion in each field) when I try to tell it that it's PAL with fields for deinterlace purposes. When a frame is split into two fields, it looks like approx. 10 lines came from the even field then the next 10 lines came from the odd field, repeat.

PAL/NTSC?
FPS (24,25,29.97)?
Pulldown/Pullup Telecine stuff?
Convertion?
Exported using what with what settings?

[ShadowMaker SdR]

If you're talking about the multiplicity, the original footage was Pal fielded, but since fields are a b*tch to roto and something had to be done to keep the footage even remotely bandwith friendly, I just threw away every other field, so it basically became full frames 25 fps with half height frames.
(okay, that doesn't make any sense)
So in DFX use 'full frames' and either change the pixel aspect ratio in the loader or resize to 720x576 to see the file it's supposed to be viewed.

[bartrobinson]

If you're talking about the multiplicity, the original footage was Pal fielded, but since fields are a b*tch to roto and something had to be done to keep the footage even remotely bandwith friendly, I just threw away every other field, so it basically became full frames 25 fps with half height frames.
(okay, that doesn't make any sense)
So in DFX use 'full frames' and either change the pixel aspect ratio in the loader or resize to 720x576 to see the file it's supposed to be viewed.

Ya, I'm talking about Multiplicity. That's true, you can't roto fields, while they are still interlaced. I was planning to deinterlace. However, did you mean that you DID deinterlace the footage by eliminating every other field in the video? I ask because I can still see fields in the video, especially in the last two clips.

[ShadowMaker SdR]

Really? You still see interlacing? That shouldn't be the case. As far as I can recall I fed all footage into a fields tool and told it to strip field 2, then did a save directly after that. I'll try and see if I can find the *comp later.