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Participant
June 30, 2023
Question

Fake HDR on Interview?

  • June 30, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 287 views
Hey AE Community, I'm not sure if there is an easy solution here, but I was naive when I shot this interview and several others like it. My goal was to expose my subject during the interview and then "simply" take a few seconds of the background properly exposed and "fix it in post"
Now I am in the fix it in post stage, and I'm not sure if there is a better way. (I have a budget if there is a third party plugin that works best.)
Thumbnails below give you an idea of what I am doing, but it is not quite right. Luma Key is what I have been trying. Any ideas/suggestions? My goal is for it to just look "not as fake as it looks now" thank you in advance!
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2 replies

Community Expert
June 30, 2023

Luma key might not be the best option. Rotobrush is slow and should only really be used on short shots. 

 

If you can post a frame from a couple of the interviews without any color correction, I could give you some better suggestions for creating a suitable track matte. The white hair on the subject and the light background might cause a problem, but some color correction and fiddling may get you there with less trouble than just trying a single Luma Key solution. You are also going to need to add masks for the window frame. You will not find a one mask, one effect, solution, and the masking is going to require some keyframing unless the subject or camera doesn't move at all. 

 

In the future, try dragging your images to the Reply field instead of using the Attach button. It makes them a lot easier to see.

Mylenium
Legend
June 30, 2023

Well, you could have saved yourself the trouble by shooting against a green screen. If you have a clean plate of the window, you can try a difference key and/ or generating procedural mattes using channel operations to cut stuff out, but otherwise you're facing loots of work. The sky is as white as the highlights on the face and the window beams are as black as the shirt. See the problem? You'll still have to do quite a bit of masking even if you can generate mattes, at least where the guy and the background intersect. Hard to tell what might work without at least images of the clean plates to check what might work by loading them in AE and dabbling with effects...

 

Mylenium