exploring and sharing creative possibilities
I am now back from my vacation in croatia – with lots of video footage to be edited and put to a watchable dvd.
I decided to use blender for the deinterlacing, editing and creation of the mpeg2 streams. QDVDAuthor will be used to create the final DVD.
After that I hope to get me back (and to scrape enough time together) on continuing Ara’s Tale.
I think I managed to create a generic and versatile setup for lightsaber rotoscoping and applying the actual effect. I created a Nodegroup where you can just feed in the image of the lightsaber and the desired color.
I experimeted a lot with the best techniques for the actual rotoscoping work. But I always arived at the same conclusion: to really get satisfying results you have to rotoscope each frame.
Here is a still with a crab sith lord sitting on my staircase
The original footage from the video below was taken during a hiking trip not far fro were I live. My daughter and her friend is acting as jedi padawans in a rather dramatic environment. Pity was they just had wodden sticks as lightsabers, which was a really tedious work to rotosopce correctly. Any way this is my first attempt. I will improve the flashes ro be more dynamic. A completely new area will be the sound fx, which I will add later on.
Lightsaber rotoscoping using blender from Martin Lubich on Vimeo.
I will submit these entries to the actual lightsaber rotoscoping challenge at blenderartists, and after that I will upload the blend files and a description on how to use the lightsaber node setup.
Right now my main interest with using blender is to use it with live action footage. This includes rotoscoping, mixing live action with 3D footage ( which in itself is a huge area to explore ) and also using the sequencer as non linear video editing system for my dv footage.
I am proud owner of a panasonic dv camcorder and looked for a reliable solution for video capturing, editing and dvd creation under linux. The process took quite some time and incorporated the evaluation of kino/dvgrab, kdenlive, qdvdauthor and of course blender.
Right now I use dvgrab for capturing the dv footage, blender for all the editing and conversion to a mpeg2 stream and qdvdauthor to actually master the dvd. I found blender to be extremely fast and capable of handling multi GB raw material, and once I had enough practice the editing process was very fast as well. The additional benefit of incorporationg simple rendered footage (e.g. Text) makes it a very versatile tool.
Today I discovered a new challenge at blenderartists.org, dealing with rotoscoping a lightsaber into live action footage. As I have played around with this just some weeks ago and came to a generic lightsaber node setup, I will maybe give this a try.