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MillimeterPioneering HD Spots Compositing for a New Era
May 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
While serving as visual effects supervisor and Inferno artist on a new HD commercial promoting RCA's high-definition TV sets, Andy Milkis of Black Logic, New York, found himself painstakingly tweaking scenes that would have normally required quick and simple composites. In the :30 spot "Adjust" an HD television's video sharpness bar breaks out of the TV and careens through a suburban neighborhood, wrecking everything in its path. As the bar speeds by RCA's mascot dogs, Nipper and Chipper, sit watching on a grassy lawn. The two canines came from two different takes-no big deal for a NTSC spot.
The RCA piece, however, is one of a few U.S. commercials produced and broadcast in high-definition. For Milkis, compositing certain scenes was a more complex than it would have been had the spot been produced and broadcast solely in NTSC. "It would be simple to composite two dogs from two takes together because the director [Barton Landsman] was careful to lock down the camera and maintain identical lighting," says Milkis. "I could have done a simple split screen thing-you could even do it in an online edit room. In this case, however, the spot was high def, and fine detail was visible. That gave us issues relating to the grass where the dogs were sitting-certain blades of grass didn't line up in the two takes. Instead of quickly putting the dogs together, it became a task of borrowing grass from different portions of both takes and carefully combining them. What would have essentially been a no-brainer in NTSC turned into a five-hour compositing job just to get that one detail right."
Another shot, which shows the sharpness bar smashing through a rose bush, also required a less-than-typical approach. "We did not shoot the bush green screen because there was no way to place a screen behind the bush where we could get clean mattes of tiny elements like twigs, branches, and leaves," Milkis recalls. "Since it was HD, though, it turned into a monster of a shot, exponentially more intricate than it would have been in an NTSC piece. In NTSC, I would have simply built mattes for four to five little holes in the bush where I wanted to insert the green bar. In HD, though, the detail required us to hand-trace mattes for every single little leaf, twig, and petal that broke off the bush. We ended up having to painstakingly hand-paint 50 individual mattes for each of those little pieces of bush."
Milkis' examples point to just a few concerns facing commercial compositors who work in HD. The reality is that most artists have had little opportunity to do HD compositing for commercials. Several told Millimeter that most commercial clients simply have no compelling reason to jump into turbulent HD waters right now and swallow the extra costs of posting in the format. Nevertheless, HD will eventually become more prevalent in commercials.
"It's coming, even if the powers that be can't get their act together about a single HD standard right now," says Casey Conroy, visual effects producer at Ring of Fire, Santa Monica, who at press-time had done some HDTV work, but had not yet worked on an HD commercial. "Good artists don't want to be the guy stuck without a chair when the music stops. Even if companies are being careful about investing in HD recorders and transfer equipment until the format problem is sorted out, compositing artists should be learning about the differences between working in HD and other formats right now." And those differences are plentiful, if often subtle.
The Issues While compositors will certainly enjoy the benefits that will arise from HD-including the elimination of aliasing and other image-quality issues and opportunities to incorporate finer, more detailed mattes-the new format will bring challenges. Many compositors who have done episodic HDTV and film-res work suggest that when HD does hit the commercial world hard, it will impact their methods of working. Artists who spoke with Millimeter highlighted a few areas of adjustment:
Work Pace and Deadlines: "What I learned on this [RCA] spot, is that it all comes down to patience," says Quiet Man Inferno artist Pete Amante, who along with Inferno artist Johnnie Semerad, also of Quiet Man, performed compositing on the second RCA HD spot. "Compositors who have been around a long time will be reminded of the early days of digital compositing, when people had to sit around and wait for images to render. Because of the render times and the need for far greater detail, HD is likely to change the pace of how we work. I suggest people keep their mattes and renders lean whenever possible."
Semerad adds that altering work pace will necessitate a big "psychological" change. "Commercial people are going to have no choice but to slow down and work more like film compositors work, and that might cause problems for clients who can't extend deadlines," he says.
Management and Scheduling: "People are going to have to re-evaluate scheduling, bidding, budgets ... all that stuff," says Conroy. "It's a higher-resolution format and render times will grow, so compositors will have to be scheduled differently. Facility managers will have to schedule render and data-transfer shifts in relationship to compositors. That added time will have to be reflected in budgets and bids."
Preproduction: The old "fix it in post" adage is likely to rear its head for a while, compositors suggest. "It will be a learning time for all of us, including the live-action people," says Verdi Sevenhuysen, a Flame/Inferno artist at Riot, Santa Monica, who recently worked on his first HD spot, for Radio Shack. "Set builders, makeup people, they will all take a while to learn about the details that can show up on an HD image. I suspect little things will often get onto the film that we'll be asked to remove, even more than we do now. In my opinion, that's why detailed pre-planning involving the compositing and effects people will be more crucial than ever. They'll really need to consult us on how to frame images to secure proper elements, since shooting HD for commercials is essentially like shooting on film, rather than video, even though most of these projects, for the time being, will still be outputted for standard television viewing."
Color and Grain Correction: Sevenhuysen also points out that HD involves images created at a higher resolution than traditional video but at a lower resolution than film, which will most likely remain the preferred origination format for major commercials. Therefore, he suggests, artists will potentially grapple with more color and film-grain issues on HD spots.
"In particular, I anticipate color depth problems," Sevenhuysen says. "When we digitally transfer film to the HD realm, we get a similar resolution to film but not the same color depth, since film can carry more color information. When transferred to the digital realm, HD images will, of course, have far more pixels than traditional video, but per pixel, the color data will be the same as NTSC video. So artists might be faced with spending more time pulling keys that properly match the color depth of the live-action plate. If the data comes in via a film pipeline, then you can compensate for some of that. But even then, you might face film-grain problems. With NTSC footage, grain is smaller and less obtrusive. It might cause some image noise if they didn't use the right film stock, but it isn't usually a big deal. With an HD signal, on the other hand, you might pick up film grain as splotches-the same kind of problem film people sometimes face. That's going to make things trickier. I think these problems will be less severe when feature-film DPs shoot the images, but in some cases, compositors will find themselves fixing lots of grain splotches, in addition to everything else."
Tricks and Cheats: Compositors say many common compositing tricks and cheats will disappear for HD commercials, simply because almost everything in HD will be visible to viewers.
"We won't have the opportunity to hide and blend things in HD commercials because the higher resolution and aspect ratio means more things will show up," says Chris Jones, an Inferno artist at POP, Santa Monica. "In the end, that can make us all better compositors, I suppose. And besides, we'll develop new tricks that we can apply to HD images."
Compositing Convergence Many artists say that HD's effects on the commercial process may move spot compositing closer to feature film-style methods. They also say that commercial compositors could learn from feature-film artists, whose facilities are already set up to handle high-resolution images and data. These predictions are based on the belief that film and HD procedures are inherently similar.
"The resolution is like film, the aspect ratio and number of frames is similar, the images will continue to be shot on film and then transferred, we'll have film grain issues, longer render times, and we won't be able to hide very much in compositing. That means it will be a more draining process for compositors, much like feature-film work, but without their kind of lead time," says Jones of HD.
The paradigm shift from NTSC to film-like HD methods could lead to the expansion of compositors' overall skills. Based on his experience with the RCA spot, Milkis, for instance, suggests that extensive HD work is bound to improve a compositing artist's understanding of other disciplines, such as editing.
"This commercial, like most commercials, was shot on film," Milkis explains. "That film got transferred into digital files on a hard disk, which then got plugged into my Inferno. But since I was working with individual files on a computer, all the time-code reference, a normal videotape procedure, disappears. I got an edit list from the Avid editor, but I then had to eye-match the cut, which is much closer to a film procedure than a videotape procedure. I had the editor's cut and the high-resolution images, and based on that, I had to eye-match the cut, which isn't easy. Therefore, I had to understand editing in order to do that job successfully."
Indeed, in expanding their capabilities to meet the demands of HD, compositors may end up expanding their roles. "I teach a class on Inferno compositing at NYU, and one thing I always tell my students is that a good compositor is multi-faceted," Milkis notes. "That will be even more true with HD work: We'll need to understand editing, lighting, animation, painting, type design, all those different things. The compositing box is likely to evolve into more of a one-stop shopping process by the time this transition is complete-we'll be editing and onlining spots ourselves, in addition to traditional compositing work."
Many artists say that recent commercial compositing developments revolve not only around HD, but around compositors' understanding of 3D animation tools. Geoff McAuliffe, an Inferno artist at 525 Studios, Santa Monica, calls this a quest to create "well-rounded compositors."
"I find myself using 3D tools a lot more than I ever used to," says McAuliffe. "I strongly feel the future of compositing will see a convergence between 2D and 3D work, and I think we're already in the early stages. Years ago, you never had an Inferno artist running a major 3D package himself. Now, in our facility, we run several programs ... We still have a 3D department that does detailed 3D work, but I find Maya helps me be a better compositor. I can build simple models and animate them directly in Inferno now, and it also helps me with 3D tracking work."
McAuliffe also says that 3D tools like Maya help compositors work with clients. "I can show clients the kind of elements we'll need to make a composite work," he notes. "By having that capability, we can work with the client to evaluate if the best solution for an effect is 2D or 3D and whether they need additional 3D help or whether I can handle it myself. In the end, that saves them money, which is obviously very important."
Even when commercial compositors are not performing 3D work themselves, many are finding their collaboration with 3D artists to be more intense than in the past, often at the behest of effects-friendly directors. For example, director Nick Piper partnered POP Inferno artist Chris Jones with POP's 3D artists for two recent Chevrolet Monte Carlo spots that involved compositing Warner Brothers' Tasmanian Devil and a CG tornado.
"Our CG people used Maya to build a 27-element, particle-based twister for the most recent commercial, a complex element," explains Jones. "That required constant communication, constant back-and-forth from beginning to end-way more than previous jobs. Directors like Nick want to move away from the constraints of motion control and have compositing backgrounds themselves. So the planning process for how to combine our tools to create this effect was far more complex, and that's a direct result of having a director who really understood compositing."
Chalice artist Danny Braet of Station X Studios, Santa Monica, adds that the biggest change he has seen is "an explosion of graphics." Braet attributes this to the orgy of dot-com commercials that need "funky" logos. "The type of graphics we're doing these days are very layered and require detailed compositing," says Braet. "I also do 3D work here [in LightWave], as do most of our compositing artists, and I've seen lots of logo work that incorporates 3D and 2D elements. Depending on the job, it's often easiest for me to create 3D elements myself and then manipulate and color correct them in one of our compositing programs. These things used to be more separate. Now, it's all inter-related."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
