Mailing List AE-List@media-motion.tv — Message #54717
From:
Mr. Eric D. Kirk <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject:
Re: [AE] Looking for Recommendations on Creating Blur Matte
Date:
Mon, 28 Jul 2014 12:52:30 -0400
To:
After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Hi Victoria,
Another gentleman asked last night but I just now uploaded a still to show what I'm up against and it's pretty much various angles of this, now zoomed in quite a bit. For example, right now, the picture on the right no longer even shows.
Is the background already a little soft? I wonder if it might be possible to batch through the frames using Photoshop's new feature that automatically creates mattes based on out of focus pixels?
Ok, so I've got an odd one here. I am doing VFX for this movie and in two scenes, the folks basically filmed at a location in which they did not have pre-approval. Soooo, at first they wanted me to attempt to change the entire background so that you could not tell it was the original place.
I spent many days changing out ceiling lights, adding an exit sign, a map on wall, etc but that did not seem to be enough. After exhausting myself trying to explain that what they were asking was for someone to completely rotoscope out several people, with lots of movement, etc and it just was not doable. I tried to roto even one person out but with the amount of movement, hair flying around, etc, it was not within my ability.
I think even a roto expert would be shying away from this. So, that's the background.
Now, the approach has changed to them asking me to give it more of like a camera depth thing where I just blur all of the background. That too has it's challenges but masking and feathering out a blur adjustment layer is definitely less noticeable than the roto deal.
However, the amount of blur they want seems pretty excessive and as you might imagine, the more blur, the more likely it will be noticeable as you try to gradually feather out edges as the meet the person in the foreground.
I was trying to do something like create a matte using the much lighter background (the wall is white) and then just blur that layer.
So, I'm looking for ideas on an approach that one of you smart folks here might have.