I cut a short 30 minute competition entry for a friend today. A relatively simple single-take green screen over a Pond 5 background she purchased.
Except we used a bunch of technologies that were all non-existent just a few years ago.
Starting with some ProRes files from a Blackmagic Design camera, we:
- Sped up the talent about 20% with no visible or audible artifacting
- Keyed out the green background by using the built-in keyer in FCP X at the default settings
- Repositioned the talent to better fit the background shot
- Slowed down the background to 66% with no visible artifacting
- Applied a real time blended mask and gaussian blur on the background (over a duplicate, not blurred copy to simulate depth of field
- Used the Color Board to reduce the exposure on her face, while using a mask so her eyes continued to sparkle
all in real time on a 2015 Retina 5K iMac and Final Cut Pro X.
It wasn’t that long ago that applying a soft edge to a mask; or any gaussian blur, or any chroma key meant a render before playback.
Like in the machine learning/AI field, the video technologies also keep getting better all the time.