If you’ve tried to stabilize footage in Blender at any point since the inclusion of tracking tools during the production of Tears of Steel, you may have noticed a large, glaring omission – scale. Translation and rotation, no problem. But we have not been able to stabilize scale in Blender at all.
Handheld camera work is very common today, but if you’re out there shooting your own movies, sometimes you may find your footage has a high frequency shake that is just really annoying. I’ve found that the smaller the camera is, the more chance there is of introducing that jittery motion. With people shooting movies on smartphones and GoPros, cameras really can’t get much smaller! That means there is a lot of high frequency jitter in those handheld shots. (more…)
Lately I’ve been doing more and more for 3DArtist magazine. I got to meet editor Steve Holmes at Siggraph last year, and since then, he keeps inviting me back to do more fun compositing tutorials in Blender, which of course is a pleasure.
This is one I did for them in Issue 88. I wanted to introduce people to the idea that Blender isn’t only a 3D program, but could be used in place of Nuke or After Effects for most compositing tasks. One of the simplest and most common jobs is replacing a screen on a device. Monitors, phones, tablets, televisions, this technique works for any of those. It also works for anything flat in general, like billboards, walls, floors, replacing book covers, photographs, etc.
A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of working with Wes and Jonathan over at CGCookie. I’d known them for at least a year or so at that point, after having approached Jonathan at Siggraph to let him know that I had gotten started with Blender by following the great tutorials over at BlenderCookie. After they invited me to do some tutorials for them, we decided on a comprehensive 2D tracking course.
I had a couple reasons for wanting to do a 2D tracking course. Of course I was tempted to jump right into the deep end and do some kind of complex vfx scene, but if we did that, I’d have to explain a lot of the tracking as the training progressed. Not only tracking, but other basic skills, like rotoscoping, would slow us down. Tracking and rotoscoping are important enough to warrant focused training on their own. So I thought it best to start with tracking. This course was the beginning of that foundation.
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