Never again unless payment is involved

I spent a lot of time on one thing this weekend.

For those of you who aren’t aware, rotoscoping involves drawing a matte over video, one frame at a time.

We’re shooting a short documentary on the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.  The way the camera was set up for the interviews meant that we didn’t get the pretty shallow depth of field we wanted, which is an in-camera effect that throws the background out of focus, drawing attention to the person in the foreground.

My job, after designing the intro animation, was to go in and fix the interview footage in After Effects (amazing program, by the way), manually throwing the background out of focus.

Never.  Again.

To start, there is no substitute for the shallow depth of field effect that occurs in the camera lens.  Don’t even argue with me on that.

Second, if you’re looking to recreate this effect in post, save yourself a headache and just reshoot if you can.  Walk the camera back as far as possible, zoom the lens way the hell in there, and drop your f-stop to a 1.8 and throw a neutral density filter if you need it.  This will by far be less work than doing it manually.

to give you an idea, I was given ten clips, each averaging less than a minute.  Lucky my weekend was open, because I started fixing this stuff Friday morning and finally finished Monday night. Good thing I finished, because carpal tunnel may have been an hour away.