Vlad G Pohnert wrote:watched your sequence, couple of suggestions comments. What program are you using to overlay the characters? It looks like your using photoshop and cutting each frame seperatly.
Yup. Then I'm saving the finished clips and using ACDSee to flip back and forth between frames with the scroll wheel to check for accuracy.
This kind of effect is best done in After Effects which would make it go much faster as well. But assuming you dont have the program, Photoshop can work as well but will take much more time to look convincing. (I've done it both ways in my videos).
I've never actually used After Effects, but I think I should probably check it out sometime.
Some of the edges still needs work since they are a big too rough and still contain a few pixels of the background being cut out. best is not to blur the whole image since it will not match the other one even more, but to manually blur just the edges a bit so the the character blends in.
That's what I did already, but the problem is that the resolution just isn't fine enough to blend it any better using that method. I've found though that if I use the point to point selection tool and just select the general outter edges that look roughest and then use a soften or gause filter they can come together pretty nicely.
The other big giveway is the different lighting of both characters. This is bar fat the hardest part to make it look convincing but it required otherewise the whole thing still looks like an overlap rather than a natural scene. Try to darken the "Mother" Character to match the more darker bed scene. You'll have to play around with brightness/contrast/saturation and color balance settings to make it work.
Nah, I tried that already and she wound up looking real. She's supposed to be more of a dream/ghost which is why it's better that she's brighter than the rest of the scene, that'll be more apparent when I do the sparkle fade in thing. But yeah, given the two different kinds of lighting it makes blending that much harder.
I can simpathize with the amount of time this takes, I did a whole video with 2/3 of the footage being overlays of three characters and that took well over 300+ hours to do. I've now developed faster methods to work with masks that would cut the time down and do something like this sequence in about 2-3 hours.... Keep experimenting and see what you come up with!
Vlad
Did you do lip synching effects along with your overlay stuff? If so I should go and check out yer videos (if ya got em up for download).


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