Assignment 1 Reflections

Keying:

For me the hardest part of the keying exercise was masking off the blue patch on the footage. I had to use two masks, one to remove the green screen equipment from the edge of the footage, and another one on top of that to remove the blue patch.

To achieve the optimal result for the keying exercise I had to use two masks, one to remove the film equipment that was visible in the edge of the footage, and a second animated mask to remove the blue patch. I also had to play with the brightness and contrast of the backplate to match it to the footage as the shadows were too light.

I think that the edge of my keyed footage might be a little fuzzy, which is something I would have liked to tweak. Other than that, I believe it was quite a successful attempt.

Rotoscoping:

For the rotoscoping exercise I found that the hair proved to be the hardest part. Finding a balance between showing the hair and leaving parts of the background visible required some work and I did lose some of the hair in the process.

I did not have to use any tools outside of the rotobrush and the refine edge tool for the rotoscoping exercise, though I had to spend quite a bit of time with those two tools to achieve a decent looking result.

I could definitely had improved on how I handled the hair. I would have liked to start over and take far more care over setting up my rotoscope so that I did not lose the edge of her hair, nor include parts of the background.

Camera Tracking:

The hardest part of the camera tracking exercise was making sure that the tracker followed a smooth path. During my initial attempt I had to manually set the keyframes for a section of the tracker and one frame was incorrectly placed. This resulted in the backplate jumping. I had to redo the entire tracking sequence to correct that one frame. 

Because I had already set up the masks and adjusted the colour and brightness of the backplate during the keying exercise, I had little to do to get the best possible result for this exercise. 

I think that this was quite successful with little that I would improve upon. All that I would do is check that there are no keyframes for the tracker that make the backplate jump, as that is quite noticeable.

Colour Grading:

While the colour grading exercise initially seemed quite easy, I did find that it required a large amount of careful tweaking to achieve a decent looking result. My first attempts were either too green, or too red, which meant I had to try several times.

I used several adjustment layers to achieve my end result in the colour grading exercise, including a levels layer to remove the green tint from the footage, a shadows/highlight layer to darken the shadows, a curves layer to tweak the light/darkness of the image, and a vibrance layer to alter the saturation of the overall footage.

I would have like my colour grading to have a more definite style to it. All I did was optimize the footage as best I could. The original footage was slightly green-tinted, which I did not realise until I had begun the colour grading. That was something I wanted to fix, as well as making the shadows bolder, because the footage seemed a little washed out.

Footage:

If I was to re-film the footage we used for the keying, camera tracking and colour grading exercises, I would have been more careful to avoid shadows across the actor's face. This is something I noticed while completing the exercises. There are definite shadows from equipment that do not belong in the scene and they are slightly distracting.

I would also do something about that blue patch. There seems to be no real purpose to it other than to test our ability to use masks.