Tracking for the fire

 

In order to place the fire on Luke's hands and arms, I have used a tracking point to connect the fire to a path of movement. I found this difficult to get my head round at first but I as I continued to use it, I learnt the best ways to use the motion tracking. Some shots were particularly difficult to track such as when Luke holds his hands by his side and the turns. When Luke turns around, the tracking goes off point so I had to work around this in different ways.  I used tracking for the majority of shots with fire to create the movement of the fire with his hands.

 

 

 

Green Screen in After Effects

Green Screen:

After working out my problem, I carried on working on removing the green screen behind the dancers. I did this by controlling the different levels in 'keylight', removing the green and increasing the screen gain and decreasing the balance. After removing the green I had to tweak the colour of their skin and hair. This was difficult because the green reflected off their hair so I had to carefully adjust the saturation, contrast and brightness.

 

Fire:

The image below is a screenshot of my first fire flame, I created this using the particle system and layered it with other effects. This is my first attempt of the fire, I feel like I can definitely improve this as I carry on working as I want his hands and arms in flames and this flame I have created is not as realistic as I would like.

 

 

 

 

Problem with Avid to After Effects

When I arrived back from Easter break I was told that Avid Media Composer work flow to After Effects  is not very compatible, and that it would have been easier to have created the video on Premiere Pro, exported it and sent it straight to After Effects.

However, I knew there would be a way round it but It would take more time. I searched on Google how to do this and followed the steps. I needed to export the video as DNxHD Quicktime for it After Effects as reference, exported the file as an AAF and then when I opened up After Effects I went to 'Pro Import After Effects' and imported the file.

The timeline seemed to come into After Effects absolutely fine. Started to work with the key light, removing the green background and correcting the dancers' saturated skin. I spent about two hours playing around with the green screen and I saved what I had done.

I came back to work in After Effects today and opened up my project to find my work and the timeline in blocks of colour. Notifications kept popping up on my screen so I knew straight away it was something to do with not being able to access the Black Magic files. But I couldn't understand how to fix this problem.

I got help from Peter and Stefan who tried various different ways of trying access the files. In the end it was something to do with the MXF server and because the footage I shot were RAW files. I moved all the files into the same folder and connected to my avid project on the MXF. Every time I edit on After Effects, I need to make sure I open up the MXF server before hand connect to my project.