From the course: Photoshop: Creative Video Compositing

Lighting, motion, and the "action area" - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop: Creative Video Compositing

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Lighting, motion, and the "action area"

- [Instructor] When you're shooting video to use in compositing projects, there are several things to keep in mind that will ensure that you capture footage that is usable for the composites that you need to create. Let's take a look at a few examples. So one of the first things to keep in mind, and possibly one of the most important ones, is the quality of light that you're shooting in. You wanna have the quality of light in the video that you shoot match the quality of light in any composited element that you're gonna add to it. So for instance, you wouldn't wanna have video shot on an overcast day composited with elements that were photographed on a bright, sunny day, because the quality of light and the shadows just wouldn't match. You should also have the quality of light match for different shots that are meant to be in the same sequence, especially if those shots were made on separate days. So these shots of the Bear River were all specifically photographed at times of the day when I knew the river would be in the shade because I didn't want any hard sunlight on the surface of the water. The other thing to keep in mind is motion. So let's look at this clip here of the book in the river. This is of course the clip that was used for the composite where we added the leading actress' face onto the blank page. The important thing about this clip in terms of motion was that the side of the book where her face went does not move. It doesn't really matter if the part of the book that's in the water moved a little bit, as long as the side of the book with the blank page is static, then it's okay. In an earlier version of this that I'd shot, I'd actually positioned the book in such a way that a particularly strong little wave from the river came by and it kind of jostled it a little bit. So I couldn't use that clip, because the motion was just enough that it made the composite impossible, because as the book moved, her head did not move and that kind of destroyed the effect. So, I had to go back and re shoot the scene. Now, in terms of motion, another thing to think about, especially for compositing in Photoshop, is that you cannot have camera movement. All of your camera shots need to be static. When you get into more full-featured editing and video compositing programs like Adobe After Effects, then you can have camera motion, and you can do more complicated motion masking. But for doing this in Photoshop, the camera has to be still in order for any compositing to be convincing. In addition to lighting and motion within the shot, you should also keep in mind issues such as perspective and angle of view. Does the perspective of the main video shot you're using match the perspective of any elements you're compositing into it? Keeping all of these things in mind will help keep your composites more believable. And another important thing to keep in mind when you're creating video for a compositing project is to identify what the action area is in the photo. The action area is the part of the scene where there is live action that you want to show. This could be anything like the motion of a river, or waves crashing at the beach, or it might even involve actors moving through the scene and playing their parts. Here's an example from a project that we're gonna be tackling later in the course. This is a picture of a bridge over a river in the mountains where I live. And the reason that I chose this location for the video is that I had a specific composite in mind to place here, and I needed a location where I could also have actors moving through the scene, but still be able to add my composite. So the composite in this case is going to be added on the right side of the image, and it's gonna be attached to the existing structure of the bridge. And then, up in the upper left, there's a really nice area where the actors can move about and actually interact with this structure and even disappear inside of it. So my action area in this scene is right here, in the upper left side of the image. The actors are essentially free to move all throughout this area, they just cannot come down in front of the bridge structure, or down below it, because I'm gonna be compositing other things in there. So I knew going into this, as I set up my shot, what my action area was, and that helped me to frame the shot to work with the existing composite that I already had in mind. So when you're out shooting video for use in a composite project, having an understanding of the importance of lighting and angle of view, as well as a plan for where the action area is in the scene, and how it will blend with the composited elements, will ensure that the final result will be convincing and effective.

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