Brooklyn, New York
Ok so this week I’m diving into rotoscoping. That means isolating moving things from the background so that they can be independently manipulated. It’s the red hallway effort, that is changing the lights in the hall between cabins to a red submarine type color. Here’s why…
1) Red lights were used to indicate night time aboard submarines, to maintain dark adaption and for running on batteries (before nukes). Red light is hard to see from a distance. The halls in the DOG boat are darkish even in daytime so they would need to have lights on 24 hours. The engineer has only energized the emergency circuit to conserve power, which uses red lights.
2) Red is a swell color for our first look at joe, and for gerry’s visit from christina. it suggests the red smokey wombs of low birth which hooks into buddhism somewhere as referenced by PKD. it suggest blood and crisis. it’s sexy!
3) Red helps the speedup of c’s knocking at g’s door.
There are about 18 scenes that include the hall, 8 that need heavy frame by frame roto work, 6 that need a simple doorframe mask and 4 that need an animated mask to cover the grid of a screen door.
Here’s c meeting j at the door. Notice the colored lines, those are masks defining which part of the image is transparent.
As the characters move, the masks have to move too, sometimes frame by frame (24 frames for each second of video).
As I was laying out roto splines in After Effects sunday, I started thinking about color correction and how to get my 3 way color correctors from FCP into AE. I have completely color corrected the entire movie in FCP, but the motion graphic work requires that I bring clips into AE and handle the color correction there. Yesterday I cranked on research and discovered a couple of things. FCP 3 way color correctors can’t be translated to AE. So I am going to have to redo some color correction (perhaps all of it – yikes!) There’s a well reviewed corrector that works in AE and FCP, called Colorista from Red Giant ($200). Apple’s color is also an option, but the learning curve is not one I am willing to deal with at the moment. One thing also seems apparent, before I go to any farther with color correction, I had better get an accurate monitor solution. Last spring I was thinking about Matrox’s MXO which allows an Apple Cinema Display to display HD accurately ($900). I already own two ACDs, and the new Panasonic monitor that I like is around $5k, a budget breaker in these low income times. The Matrox has great reviews, so that’s what I picked up yesterday at BH. I also stopped off at Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of Stu Maschwitz’s hilarious DV Rebel Guide. I burst out laughing a couple times reading Stu’s book while waiting for the author of Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein to speak, but by 7:30 I realized that I had the date wrong and she had already been there a week prior.
Anyway a good day of discovery all in all. Stu’s book rocks but his movie “Last Birthday Card” which is included on a DVD with the book is awful – except for the amazing homebrew special effects. No matter, his ideas are sharp and techniques super useful, he even has another option for my color correction dilemma.
I fired up the Matrox box this morning and it seems to be working. Not a moment to soon… If I set this sucker up correctly, then my earlier color treatments are way dark. So it’s all good! Betterer and betterer.
Fuzzy shot of the new gear. The mxo is the box on the table with the blue light.
