Will DFx help me with this project?

[Briody]

Hello,

I am Lightwave 7.5 user and I'm thinking of making the upgrade.

I typically composite in After Effects, but I'm wondering if my current project would be better suited for Digital Fusion.

It's a 10 second clip (shot in 24p) of 2 actors walking through a forest. They are walking in a clearing and not really interacting with trees or anything. The scene is shot in daylight. The background is stationary, only the actors are moving.

The client would like fog in the scene so that the actors are walking out of the fog.

I do have an excellent 35mm shot of the same location with real fog. The camera angle is slightly different, but close enough where I could key out the actors and comp them into the photo with the real fog.

But after seeing the Digital Fusion videos here, I'm thinking that maybe I should key out the actors and create a depth matte, then use digital fog from Digital Fusion.

Any thoughts or ideas on this?

Thanks

Mark

[rko]

The fog tool is a 3D tool. It is intent to use on images with depth information.
But a normal image does not contain this kind of information. It should be possible to create it and then use the fog tool. But this is like creating an alpha channel and mixing the fog.
In a quick test I created a flow to try this as you can see in the screen shot. I did use masks on the merge tool to create the correct merge for people who where more in the foreground and used the level control to put them in front or more halfway the fog.

In this case I did not use any special tools and this must be possible in most composition software. Rotoscoping and masks work very well in DFX+. Almost all things can be animated and also the level of the masks so for moving people you can move them to more to the front when they move to the camera

I have not a lot experience with composition tools so there may be better ways to do this.