Compositing: fatter pipe makes it quicker, 20/30 integration makes it tighter, and less expensive software makes it cheaper

Post, Feb, 2004 by Ann Fisher

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A more recent Black Box compositing project was some work for the CBS series The District. Torres says the work on this project is a typical example of how a lot of TV is done. The show is shot in Los Angeles and it's up to Black Box Digital to put it in its proper city in post. In the case of The District it's Washington, DC. "The problem is that a lot of these shows are finished in HD," says Torres. "They want all their effects in HD rez but they only have a budget for 601 rez. That is when lower-cost compositing software like Shake makes all the difference. Since Shake was originally designed to handle film rez it has no problem with HD. Since most of the time they don't shoot the backgrounds we end up using royalty-free hi rez photographs. They need to be high rez because usually there is a move or zoom in the shot. I track the still background, color correct it to match the scene, add some birds or moving flags so it doesn't look like a still, and there's the shot."

GOING BACK IN TIME

Intelligent Creatures (www.intelligentcreatures.com), a Toronto-based feature film effects company, opened in April 2003. CEO/compositing supervisor Michael Hatton had previously worked at Command Post/Toybox.

He and the other two co-founders (Ray Gieringer and Lon Molnar) had given much thought to where the compositing industry was headed when they selected Eyeon Digital Fusion as their compositing software.

"My background is in Discreet Inferno, but when we started this company, it was our experience that the Inferno paradigm of one glory artist on one high-end box was way too expensive," says Hatton. "We looked at alternatives, compositing solutions like Shake, Combustion, After Effects, and did rough evaluations that ranged from what the software could do, the support to plugins available, the cost, the future, the direction of the software. Our initial thoughts had been Shake, but with Apple's decision to pull it from the PC platform we thought that wouldn't be for us. We found Digital Fusion, but the thing that sold us was that Eyeon Software was literally two to three doors down from us--we have a great support relationship with them."

They used Digital Fusion V.4.0, running on customized boxes with Quadro FX 2000 cards, 2GB of RAM and dual 3GB processors, for a shot in Miramax' Valentines Day release Havana Nights (Dirty Dancing 2). 2d3's Boujou was used for tracking, Photoshop for matte painting and Maya for 3D. Set in 1950's Cuba, the shot was lensed in Puerto Rico down a street of palm trees that ended in a grand 1950's hotel. The effects house had to replace an unsuitable 1970's apartment building in its place. The challenges included tracking the camera pan through there, building up a 3D hotel, keying in the sky, rotoscoping a million palm fronds and matching the lighting and color. The client liked the result so much that it decided it wanted to do a day-for-night color timing, which Intelligent Creatures nixed ("the color always looks the way it is"). They suggested adding more appropriate lighting with matte painting techniques.