SFX Workflow

Apr 09, 2008

So with our screening for "A Fairy's Tale" coming up in less than three weeks, things have really been getting down to the wire. I actually just pulled yet another all-nighter while I'm writing this, waiting for a shot to render. I think for this entry, I'll try to explain our workflow so far. Some of it gets pretty technical, and even I don't fully understand it all, but for those of you who enjoy this kind of stuff you might find it interesting.
Basically, as soon as we had picture lock, I began exporting each individual frame as a still image. To keep the highest quality possible preserved, I exported as a 16-bit RGB TIFF with no compression, in sequential files for each shot. We organized these by scene and then by shot. Then we took these and imported them into After Effects in order to start keying out the blue screen. Now, after that things got a little complicated and we had to spend a lot of time troubleshooting. First, we had shot at 59.94 frame rate, because with the Vericam, it can only handle that at a 720p image, and still be able to dump it to D5 at the end. The trouble was we couldn't replicate it in After Effects, we had a lot of problems with how the project settings were set up. We eventually figured it out, but it took some time and a lot of people were confused, me being one of them.
Also, we wanted to export another set of TIFFs with the blue keyed out so we could start keying in LUSTRE. The problem was how to export the TIFF with the Alpha channel attached to it, so that LUSTRE could read it. We finally got it into LUSTRE, but we couldn't figure out how it was reading the Alpha channel, because when we tried exporting it again as a TIFF RGBA, it came out all funky. Finally, we decided we would just have to reapply the Alpha channel when we were done coloring in LUSTRE. It takes some more time, but saves us some headaches along the way. I actually just finished coloring last night, and it's looking great. Now we can go through and start compositing. There is one scene that we shot the plates practically for, which we can start compositing right away for, but the rest we are still waiting on some elements.
Meanwhile, my SFX supervisor has been hard at work on the backgrounds and plates. We just got done modeling out the opening shot, which first starts in VUE (a great program for landscapes) but then switches over into Maya. The issue that we're running into now is that the render time for a 45-second shot will take over two months to complete. And, we're obviously premiering in less than 3 weeks, did I mention that? So we're trying to talk to our school into letting us set up our computer labs as a render farm at night when hardly anyone else is here.
Anyway it's all really been stressing me out, which is why I haven't really updated. If you have any questions about the process though, or want me to go into more detail, just let me know. I like talking about it now that I actually know what I'm doing (kind of).