Sci-fi London 48-hour film challenge 2013:matte painting

The short film ‘Creep’ was our entry into the Sci-fi London 48-hour film challenge 2013.

Before

This was the unpainted frame from the Sony fs700 camera

creep_before After

Then, after 15 hours matte painting, our destroyed London shrouded in radioactive fog.
creep_after

With this kinda of thing there’s so much detail to add I’ll just keep working until some-one pulls the plug. It would have been nice to add larger broken features to the foreground but there simply wasn’t enough time.

VFX Post-production tips.

These are our top tips for managing the post-production process. Essentially we’re trying to control these truisms.

  • How do we check everyone imagines the same thing?
  • Stuff never turns out quite the way we imagined it.

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Merge Tool Maths

This is a brief breakdown of the maths behind Fusion’s Merge Tool.

The Operator modes are well documented. But, I’ve done some digging around to uncover the maths behind the Apply mode, Alpha Gain and Burn In.

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Grading artists LUT files in Fusion.


This in depth article covers ways to use a grading artist 3d LUT file to view your work in Fusion. It’s shows alternatives to using stacked LUT’s, and shows how to test your workflow for clipping. It’s part of a series of articles on Log colour and Linear workflows in fusion.

  1. Outline of a linear workflow
  2. Simple Log to Lin workflow in Fusion
  3. Using Stacked LUTs in Fusion
  4. Log Maths: Converting between gain and f-stops

How It started

We’ve been looking at a tigher workflow between the Quantel suite and the compositors at Lexhag. While setting up the linear workflow for DPX sequences and LUT files. I noticed some clipping issues in the viewport and started this thread at pigsfly.com. That thread grew into this document from some work arounds suggested by Eyeon’s tech support (who have been awesome), some head scratching, and a bit of maths. As a result this problem has been fixed in the latest version of Fusion.

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