|
Compositing means combining different images into a single shot, so that all the elements blend together seamlessly and appear to have been photographed at the same time. It is an art, it is a science, and it is a skill likely to be needed in more and more editing rooms over the coming years.
Not long ago, a single compositing station cost close to a million dollars, but now, while there are still some very expensive systems such as Discreet Flame and Inferno, there are also advanced compositing applications that start at less than $1,000 and can be run on standard desktop computers. This makes it possible for editors and assistants to experiment with these programs and find ways to incorporate them into their work. Avids and Final Cut Pro systems have simple built-in compositing tools, and any editor or assistant used to keying, layering footage, doing color correction and applying filters will find that the basic principles remain the same in any compositing program. But applications designed specifically for compositing offer a much wider and more flexible range of tools. Moreover, while nonlinear editing systems cannot yet handle film-resolution material, these programs can. On many shows, there are often elements that could be finished in the editing room, if the means were available. These applications point toward a future in which editors and assistants will be able to finish complex titles and digital opticals in their editing rooms. And at the very least, they make it possible to create rough comps that will improve communication between the editing room and the visual effects department. This article looks at four stand-alone compositing applications that can be installed on a standard desktop computer: Adobe After Effects, Eyeon Digital Fusion, Discreet Combustion and Apple Shake. They all offer the same basic features, such as keyers (used to extract a foreground object from a bluescreen or greenscreen background) and trackers (which chart motion within a shot so that images can be smoothly combined), but they have very different layouts and focuses. As you consider which compositing programs you might want to try, it’s important to consider the tasks you want to do and the operating system that you use. But ultimately, what may matter most is how the program’s workspace is laid out and whether it makes sense to you, because that will dictate how fast you can work and how much you will enjoy the process. For this article, numerous compositors and visual effects supervisors contributed their thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of the various programs and the tasks each is best suited to handle.
Adobe After Effects 6.0
After Effects made its debut at the 1993 MacWorld San Francisco,
and in the 11 years since, it has become the most widely
used desktop compositing
application. Part of the program’s popularity may stem from its
seeming familiarity — it is structured around a timeline,
which makes it comfortable for those used to nonlinear
editing systems, and
it is also reassuringly similar to (and compatible with)
other Adobe products, such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Because it has roots in the world of video, some people perceive After Effects as less capable for film work, and it does have some undeniable limitations in that area. Most notably, it cannot handle floating point operations, which means that the range of color it can represent is not equivalent to that available on a film frame. Furthermore, its color correction tools are not as well-regarded as those in some of the other compositing applications. Yet many feature films do use it for compositing, and it can measure effects in feet and frames and work at film resolution. Part of the trick is learning to work within its limitations. For example, rather than using the Brightness and Contrast controls for color correction, it’s better to attempt such fixes using Levels, where it’s possible to target more exact values. Nevertheless, many artists consider After Effects the best program for any kind of motion graphics work (animated text and images, as you might see in news or commercials). Part of this is due to the ease with which the program lets the user move elements around on screen, but part is due to its very refined animation tools. Because of its timeline, After Effects has a particularly good structure for setting and moving keyframes. It’s easy to link (or “parent”) layers to other layers, and the program enables a user to create expressions (which connect the animation of one attribute to that of another) by a simple drag-and-link operation. This turns what is usually a mathematical process into an easy-to-understand graphical one — though it is still possible to manipulate the formulas. The relative simplicity of the After Effects interface, along with its fast RAM preview, makes it useful for on-set test composites. Some visual effects artists record a feed from the main camera on a shoot, then use After Effects to pull a quick key and make a rough reference composite that everyone can review. In the past, the built-in keying tools in After Effects were not particularly strong, but the latest version, After Effects 6.0, includes the renowned Keylight keyer (though only in the professional version of the program). This means that users no longer have to buy a separate keying plug-in like Primatte or Ultimatte. Adobe has also improved the tracker in the professional version of After Effects, enabling the user to track an unlimited number of points, and it has a serviceable warping tool. For those editors and assistants who are comfortable compositing in their editing systems, After Effects is a good next step — it offers a great introduction, and anyone who masters it will find it relatively easy to pick up the other programs mentioned here. It integrates well with Avid and Final Cut Pro systems through a program called Automatic Duck, which translates project files back and forth. And among compositors, knowledge of After Effects seems like almost a given: nearly everyone who contributed to this article was well-versed in at least two programs — and generally, one of them was After Effects. You can get started by downloading a 30-day trial version of the program from www.adobe.com/products/tryadobe, and you can find a series of After Effects tips written by Ben Bardens on our website at www.editorsguild.com/AfterEffects.html.
Eyeon Digital Fusion Digital Fusion, Combustion and Shake are all very different from After Effects in the way they represent composites. Rather than being built around a timeline with layers, these three programs are all centered around a tree of interconnected nodes. Each node represents either a footage item or an operation (such as a blur or color-correction) being performed on another node. Clicking on any node shows the state of the comp at that point — this makes it very easy to see the effect that the various operations are having. The process is very nonlinear and demands an entirely different mindset from a timeline-based program, but because it offers so many ways to approach a problem, it’s also a paradigm that inspires experimentation. Unlike After Effects, Digital Fusion is definitely oriented towards film compositing and is best suited to working on a single complex shot at a time, rather than on sequences of shots like those used in motion graphics. It was originally a proprietary compositing system for an Australian effects facility called New York Production and Design (NYPD), which evolved into Eyeon Software, and it was brought to North America by the Toronto company DPS (now owned by Leitch), which makes nonlinear editing solutions. When dealing with compositing systems, one big question is always what bit depth they can support. The greater the bit depth, the more precise and detailed the system’s representation of color. After Effects can handle 8-bit and 16-bit data, but Digital Fusion, like Combustion and Shake, has the ability to process 32-bit floating-point information. This means that there are many more colors available, which is important when representing color gradients, and the wider range of values allows for more flexible exposure adjustments. Digital Fusion’s closest competitor is clearly Shake. Priced the same, the two programs are targeted mainly at visual effects studios doing elaborate composites for feature films and television. They share many similarities, both in how they operate and in the advanced features that they offer. The key difference is that Shake operates only on Mac OS X and Linux, while Digital Fusion operates only under Windows. Digital Fusion supports the import of Avid OMF files, the only one of these four applications to do so directly (but all the programs can both read and render QuickTime files). It is also unique in its particle capabilities — although both Combustion and After Effects have 2D particle systems, Digital Fusion can create 3D particles, which can be used for more realistic simulations of smoke, fire, water, bubbles and so on. The program’s scripting language means that certain time-consuming, tedious operations can be automated. Those who want to experiment with Digital Fusion can download a learning version of the program and a thorough set of tutorials from the Eyeon website at www.eyeonline.com — any footage rendered out of the program is stamped with a watermark, making it unusable, but all the tools are fully operational.
Discreet Combustion In the mid-1990s, two developers in Torrance, California, decided they wanted to make their own compositing application. Legend has it that because they had never actually seen such a program, they took a course in Discreet Flame, then based their own program, Illuminaire, on that system. If that’s the case, then they clearly learned their lessons well, because Discreet went on to acquire the company and the program, turning Illuminaire into the desktop compositing program Combustion. Combustion is the baby brother in Discreet’s family of compositing systems. Its look and layout are very similar to those of its more expensive siblings, and some tools, such as its tracker, color corrector and native keyer, are identical to those in Flame and Inferno. This means that information generated in Combustion can be transferred to the higher end systems; for example, time-consuming hand-drawing of masks can be done in Combustion, with the resulting matte file saved and imported into Flame. The biggest difference between Combustion and Discreet’s higher-end compositing systems is speed. The other products run on Silicon Graphics machines, which have very fast throughput for graphics. Even though the processors in Windows- and Mac-based machines are now very fast and can handle a lot of RAM, the data cannot be moved through the system as quickly as it can on dedicated SGI hardware. The other difference, though, is the mystique that Discreet has succeeded in building around its more expensive products. For high-end clients, especially those from the commercial world, there is a certain glamour associated with going into a Flame session. Even if Combustion can do the same type of work, there will always be people who want to work in a fancy, dark room with leather sofas and free sushi. But Combustion offers many features that make it a very worthwhile program. Its vector-based paint capabilities (used for wire removal, image retouching and so on) have always been a strong point, and it is extremely well regarded when it comes to color correction and tracking. Moreover, the sophisticated warping and morphing tools that were introduced in Combustion 3 (in the form of free RE:Vision plug-ins) work in conjunction with the tracker, which means that more complex distortions can be done with greater control. In addition to making compositing systems, Discreet also makes the 3D modeling and animation program 3D Studio Max, and Combustion works fluidly with that, even enabling the user to paint directly onto 3D models. This interactivity with a 3D application is one of the things that sets Combustion apart. While After Effects is a good starting point for editors and assistants who want to learn more about compositing, Combustion may be the next step. The node-based architecture has become the dominant paradigm for advanced compositing applications, and Combustion offers a relatively inexpensive way to experiment with it, and to learn how Flame artists work and think. You can give it a trial run by downloading a 30-day version of Combustion 3 from the Discreet website at www.discreet.com/combustion.
Apple Shake 3 Shake was designed from the beginning as a tool for visual effects, rather than motion graphics or editing. The company that created the program, Nothing Real, was founded by a group of people from Sony Imageworks who were dissatisfied with the state of their compositing tools and decided to make their own. Nothing Real was bought by Apple in 2001; soon afterward, Apple acquired another advanced compositing program, Silicon Grail Rayz, and incorporated its tools for mimicking film grain into Shake. Shake has been used primarily on high-end feature film productions. It was clearly built for film work and excels at processes involved in finishing a shot. Many compositors feel that Shake is the program to use for the hard shots, because it is so flexible and has so many options, particularly for technically adept users. It has a full scripting language, as well as a strong underlying engine for processing large amounts of data in a memory- and CPU-efficient fashion.
It also has many small yet helpful features that make using the program easier. Rotoscoping, for example, is the hand-drawing of masks around a certain area of an image, so that the area can be treated separately from the rest of the of the image. It is tedious work, but Shake makes it a little less odious with some very interesting roto tools. Most notably, where the other programs will only allow the user to feather, or soften, an entire mask, Shake makes it possible to manipulate the feathering at each control point that makes up the roto shape. Shake comes with both Primatte and Keylight, two very good keyers. Its node-based structure is also well-suited to keying: to pull a really good quality key, it’s generally necessary to do a lot of massaging and to use different tools to affect different sections of the bluescreen or greenscreen. This is much easier to do with a node-based structure. Once you have a workable process made up of a variety of nodes (for keying or any other operation), it’s possible to save the sequence of nodes as a macro that can be used later. Moreover, on websites like www.highend2d.com, you can download macros that other users have devised and posted.
While it may seem like a small point, part of Shake’s appeal comes that fact that while it’s a serious tool, it’s also funny. The excellent tutorials that accompany the program exude attitude, and even the program’s icons are silly: the button that turns on cloning shows a sheep , for example, and the button for the reveal function is a man opening his raincoat (thankfully, from behind). As of this writing, the only way to get a trial copy of Shake is to buy the Apple Pro Training Series book Shake 3: Professional Compositing and Special Effects by Marco Paolini, which comes with a 30-day Mac OS X version of the program. Conclusion
As
the old
saying goes,
if the
only tool
you have
is a
hammer, then
every problem
starts to
look like
a nail.
Using just
Avid or
Final Cut
Pro for
basic compositing
is fine,
but these
dedicated applications
introduce a
new set
of tools
that can
change the
way you
work. The increasing power of desktop hardware and software raises the prospect of a future in which editors will be able to collaborate more effectively with effects artists by producing and finishing some shots themselves in their cutting rooms, freeing up the visual effects department to do more complicated work, and hopefully, improving the process for everyone. |
