Zoom effect / motion blur

[TrenZ62]

Does anyone know how they do the zoom effect where you have a shot of the earth then it zooms to street level in a smooth transition. Most movies will have it zoom from a earth still to a cloud scene then to earth level. Hope I was clear enough.

[dreggsy]

he he this is always fun.
what you want is as many plates of the scene as possible
say a plate of the planet (earth) on a spacey background
another image of earth zoomed in a little
then a layer of clouds on top of another layer
with a layer so that cities are just visible.
and another layer so buildings are just becoming visible
and another layer with the street level.

the trick is not to zoom/scale a plate to much so as the pixels dont
become very visible.
Clouds are your friends as they can help break up the transitions.
so you really want as many plates at different depths/levels of zoom as possible. of the one area.
you can find alot of ariel shots online somewhere.
you should be able to get away with as little as 6 plates depending
on how far/near you want to zoom.

[TrenZ62]

I dont understand
I'm also using 3dmax so what I was doing was having a camera zoom in on max. Your saying I should do this that I should use stills? It would help out alot of you had an example. Thanx for the help so far.

[TrenZ62]

Dreggsey I'm still not grasping the conceot. When you have time would you be able to elaberate further or maybe there is a tut online I can't find that you might know about. Thanx

[specialk]

he means basically you assemble all the different layers on top of each other in your post program...

what you can do is in 3d build the elements, such as make a few second shot of the camera zooming into earth from space, then make another shot of say, the cam breaching the atmosphere, then make another shot closer to earth and breaking through clouds, and so on and so on....then assemble each rendered sequence in AE or combustion.....then to make it look like a smooth transition you can fidlle with the bluurs(specifically the dolly blurr in combustion its like a zoom sorta).... just make sure the camera is going the same speed in all the sequences....so when youve transitioned to each layer it looks smooth like one big long zoom down to earth......


A great example is the new Hummer commercials.....I think they have them on VFXpro.com under "design in mothion" you might have to dig in the archives but you shouldnt have to go far cuz i remember them being on there just a few days ago....anyways if you find it you can get an idea sorta on how they did it......should help.


my project right now is sorta the same, except im doing a zoom out from a super zoom microscope looking at a cell to a persons eye....ill post it in the WIP section as soon as i get it email to Vftalk

[Hugh]

You could also lay the still images out in your 3D composite in Combustion with different Z values - animate the camera moving in through them, and animate the transitions as the camera gets close to each one (for clouds, you may have a number of layers of clouds that fade out as the camera gets really close to that layer, for example)

[TrenZ62]

Thanx I got the idea now. I'll look at that hummer commercial for ideas I havent seen it yet. Thanx again

[TrenZ62]

Yea I just watched the Hummer vid one question though. Do you think the clouds were done in a 3d software or somethine like combustion.

[dreggsy]

yeah basically Specialk summed it up in one go.
( he saved me typing it out )
so say your zoom is over 10 seconds
you want to break up your shot into 5, 2 second zooms
with a nice dolly blur transition between each shot.
finding nice clouds can be a bit tricky to find.

good luck.