Morphing advice

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
September 2, 2022
3 replies
256 views

I am working on a project where I will be filming individual trees on 3 locked-off cameras: thermal imaging, infrared and standard 6k. I will do my best to line up the shots through the choice of lenses and positioning the cameras as close as possible to each other to minimise mismatches in angles.

Ultimately I will need to create a composite image with elements from each camera ebbing and flowing through the final shot. The three shots will be placed across 3 separate video tracks in my edit and I will crop and resize each to match as best as possible.

I have never explored morphing techniques for this kind of challenge. Does anyone have any advice on what might be the best way to lock these three images together to create one composite image? It has been suggested that I could use After Effects.

I mainly work with Avid Media Composer and DaVinci Resolve.

How to

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Mylenium

Legend

Arguably the actual alignment shouldn't be that far off if you film the whole thing with three cameras at the same time in sync. It really will likely boil down to applying tiny corrections here and there and fixing the slightly different perspectives plus dealing creatively with the different resolutions the cameras produce. I would not actualyl buy the plug-in until you realyl need it, but it may help to at least download the demo and a) spend an hour or so exploring its basics to get a feeler for whether it helps you in the process and b) have it already handy when needed, so it just needs to be activated. Same for any other such tools. I feel that a small test project can greatly help you understand the workflows and potential pitfalls since you never seem to have worked much with AE before.

Mylenium

I

inschAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you. That's really helpful. I have never worked with AE before.

Mylenium

Legend

Not meaning to be rude, but that's one of those "Can AE do this and that" questions that never go anywhere. The real question is whether you actually need any morphing at all or just a little help from The Puppet Tool or other distortion effects and how precise everything needs to be. As already mentioned by Roland, "real" morphing can basically only be done with third-party plug-ins that cost a hefty penny, but even then you may not want to spend your days drawing tons of masks and fiddling with complex parameters just to define sources and targets for the warping. At the end of the day this may really be more a matter of finding clever transition points, having interesting wipes ansd mask-based animations for the transitions and subtly correcting different lens distortions with effects like Optics Compensation and siimilar and the occasional bending in place of a stray twig or branch with Puppet, Bezier Warp, Mesh Warp and so on. Since beyond that generic "Yes, AE can do that (on some level)." this is of no use to you, I would suggest you actually start with shooting the footage or some test footage, try to get it aligned as best as you can and then come back with more specific questions bolstered by screenshots and relevant info or else we can be here for days having a theoretical debate that doesn't get you anywhere.

Mylenium

I

inschAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you Mylenium

That's very sound advice and I'll take it on board. With these 3 tree images, shot on three very different cameras, I want to create a composite where they are all potentially present, even in ghostly form, a lot of the time. I don't want to just fade in and out between them - I know that there are several effective morph transition effects out there that could do that. Ultimately I want to show the powerful presence of these trees - they survived an atomic bomb - with a sense that the infrared and thermal presences pulse through the more ordinary image, shot on the 6k camera. I recognise that it will be a challenge bringing these 3 images together into a coherent whole. Would I need a 'real' morphing app, such as RE:Flex to achieve what I want? And would it really take a huge amount of work with masks and targets to get the required results?

All the best, Phil

Roland Kahlenberg

Legend

RevisionFX's Reflex plugin is what AE folks use for high-level morphing.
https://revisionfx.com/products/reflex/

Very Advanced After Effects Training | Adaptive & Responsive Toolkits | Intelligent Design Assets (IDAs) | MoGraph Design System DEV

I

inschAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you. I was wondering what the high-end go-to solution would be. I will check it out.

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