Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[♪ Music ♪]
[Adobe TV Presents Colin Smith in...]
[No Stupid Questions]
I got a call from a filmmaker friend of mine.
He wanted a pretty complex shot
of a sculpted object and then a zoom,
and the zoom had to go right into the eye of this sculpted object.
Normally this object, if in the real world, is a couple of inches high,
but to help photograph it, it's made into an 18-inch sculpture,
rotate, and then the camera is supposed to zoom into the eye,
all the way into the eye.
And there's 2 problems that are introduced.
The first one is the resolution of the file.
There's only so much you can zoom in or blow up an image
before it starts to fall apart.
The bigger one, though, is the depth of field.
This is really difficult to control
when you're doing macro photography.
It's almost impossible to start from a regular position
and then zoom all the way in and still control that depth of field.
I mean, you've got to be the most amazing focus puller in the world
to be able to do that.
I'm not, so I created a technique that I just call power zoom.
The shot was being done with a Canon 5D Mark II,
a fantastic video camera, but an even more amazing still camera.
So I thought, well, why don't you pull in or rotate that object,
and then when you stop, take a photograph
because you're using the exact same camera,
and the resolution when you open up a 5D image is 60 MB in Photoshop.
That's an enormous amount of information to be able to zoom in.
You can go at 2000%.
That was the thought, so I decided to
create a technique or actually test the technique myself.
It proved much harder than I expected for a number of reasons.
Let's just go and look at the shot, and I'll explain some of the problems.
Here we have the still image.
This is a Photoshop file that I have loaded
and the actual movie file, and we've got a slider move here.
I'm using a slider from a company called Cinevate,
and this slider allowed me to get really, really close
up to a point, and then I brought in the still image,
and we zoom into the still image with all this clarity
all the way down to the letters on the page.
Okay, so what's the problem?
Well, I fixed a lot of things here.
First of all, making a slider move
is almost like a ballet.
They almost always require physical movement
to get from one side to the other, or you're twirling a dial or something,
and basically you need to have a very smooth movement.
Guess what I didn't do? I didn't pay enough attention.
I didn't do enough takes.
The end of my movement went from an accelerated speed
to a kind of slow to a stop where I wanted to have an even speed to the end.
And because of that, I ended up with a file that jerked a little bit near the end.
I sent it to a couple of people who I trust their eye.
Kush here is the director at Adobe TV,
and he said, "That's a nice test, but you might want to try to fix that."
And that's what I expected.
I thought, okay, it's not there.
Here's what I had to do.
I had to take that file,
and here's the movie file, and you can see that I'm editing the scale.
The scale of the movie file is right now at 100%,
and I'm starting to blow up the video frame itself.
And what that did was it helped mask my problems with the slider
where I stopped moving.
I deaccelerated a little bit too soon before the edge.
And at that point we introduce the other image,
and you can see it pops inside here,
and I had to do an enormous amount of color correction.
My thought was, "Hey, I'm shooting in a 5D."
"Don't the videos have the exact same look as the stills?"
Wrong. I should have shot with a chart.
Again, I was in a hurry to create this demo.
If you shoot with a chart, then at least you have an example to work with.
Any kind of HD chart would be fine, bars, something with colors,
neutrals, even a white card would have helped me.
Just hold up a white piece of paper, for crying out loud,
and I would be able to look at those because if we look at the still here
and I go over to my effects controls, let me show you the difference
when I turn off my levels.
Yow.
Yeah, that's the difference.
That's how different it was when it shot with the still,
and I also quickly added a mask down here,
and if I turn that mask on and turn the levels off,
I just added a quick mask to help me edit the colors
from the still to the video.
Instead of trying to do it from frame to frame and back up,
just create a quick mask, and of course, you can easily turn that on and off.
And now I can see where I'm matching that--
oh, let me turn my levels back on.
Very, very yellow colored paper there,
and admittedly, I could probably fix this a little bit more,
but the bottom line is not the fact that
this was completely perfect or wrong or right.
It's a technique that I wanted to throw out there
to get this amazing clarity of these high resolution stills.
It's just not as easy to blend that motion from
a complex motion like this into the page itself.
The page itself, if we look at that,
is also being scaled, so it comes in at 52%,
and then we zoom all the way up to 188%,
and if I want, I'm just going to grab these sliders
and drag all the way in.
Remember, this is a high resolution still
from the Canon 5D 60 MB file,
so I've got the option of going all the way in and doing that.
I also took my keyframes down in here,
used Keyframe Assistant and did an easy ease
in out so you can see that I'm trying as hard as I can to make these work.
I did a tiny bit of opacity change,
so if I zoom inside here, instead of just jumping to that,
I added a one keyframe opacity change in here,
which is negligible.
Maybe I could take that down to a second frame in there and bring it in.
The problem with doing too much of a difference--
so if I tried to change the opacity between that still image
in the video for too long, the problem was
you could see the words on the page from the video.
You could see the words on the page from the still.
They're never going to match perfectly,
so you saw a little bit of an effect where
you could see both at the same time, basically.
If you like that effect, it works perfect.
Just do a long dissolve between the two, but I didn't.
I just wanted that to snap in.
That's what it looked like.
That's what it was to work with.
Learn from this technique and from my mistakes.
Just do a quick RAM preview inside here,
and we'll have a look at this.
[♪ Music ♪]
That's it.
A technique that I call power zoom inside Adobe After Effects
using Photoshop stills, video and stills from the Canon 5D Mark II.
[♪ Music ♪]
[Adobe TV Productions]
