Hi! My name is Andy Gener and today I’m going to tell you about one of the most important things in visual effects. It depends on how exactly the visual effects will look on the final shot.
What is compositing?
Compositing or digital compositing in VFX is the mixing, modification or removal of several different visual elements in an image to create a single composition. In simple terms, compositing is a very realistic collage. Let me give you a simple example.
Imagine you want to take this tropical style photo. Our task is to move this jeep from the pavilion to the jungle and add another dinosaur in such a way that it looks like a complete image.
Let’s remove this dinosaur here and replace it.
I’ll also add sand, grass in the foreground, replace the background and add little blur to give this shot some movement
And this is the final result
This is how compositing is created both in the photo and in the video.
When it comes to a single photo, it is quite difficult to create a sense of the integrity of several images, but if we are talking about a video, then this task becomes several times more complicated. Video processing can take a very long time (from several hours to several weeks) because, unlike photography, objects in video have movement and the frames on the video can be tens of thousands.
In the example below, I had to create 3D plant models and match them to a real video. (This also applies a rotoscoping effect to create vegetation behind the artist.)
Depending on the budget, the composer should also be able to independently make tracking, keying, rotoscoping, create various effects and work with computer graphics.
In my example below, you can see how I remove elements of the image from the video (this technique is called “clean up”) and add new elements to the environment, thus changing the final frame. In the very last frame, you can see a good example of combining several techniques for the final result.
Sometimes the cleanup is quite simple, but time consuming. For example, in this video I didn’t have to remove a lot of moving objects, but the difficulty was in the movement of the camera and resizing the black line.
Even such big car brands sometimes need help with computer graphics. You can find out the details of the project at this link.
I think after these examples, you can definitely roughly imagine what compositing is. If you need my help, as a VFX Supervisor in creating special effects, you can contact me at any convenient time. Let me remind you that I do tracking, cleanup, rotoscoping, compositing and create 3D / 2D graphics.
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