My Bulletproof VFX Workflow (from start to finish)

[funnyberries]

I'm a professional 3D Camera tracking and layout artist. I also worked on the face capture deAging from the Irishman. Tracking cameras is my thing.
I did not know about fspy until this video!!!! This is going to save my butt when the client doesn't deliver proper lens grids! Thanks!

[piewars]

Awesome stuff! A simple compositing trick I learned is using the tint effect in after effects on your cg layer. Put a blur on your footage and crank it up so its just a blob of colors. Set the black and white points in the tint effect to the darkest and lightest areas in the blurred footage (preferably near where your cg is going to be) and then remove the blur from the footage, and dial down the tint effect to something like 20-30% and bam. Can really help if your cg elements don't have the correct color tones/lighting.

[tonythebiz]

4:02 is where i mashed the like button as hard as I could. Love the genuine emotion lol

[ZekeFaust]

Someone else mentioned EXRs for speed and quality, but another benefit is that they're encoded linearly and contain HDR values.

Linear workflow is a necessity in digital image compositing because when the code values of the footage don't match the real life light ratios, your gradients and blending will be difficult to work with and will introduce a lot of problems like edge fringing, incorrect motion blur, inaccurate lighting, and more. This is the difference between scene referred (linear) and display referred (gamma).

So instead of working on the log footage, you convert your footage to linear using either an aces IDT or other gamma converter (I believe in AE it's called color profile converter). This way it will match the EXRs coming out of blender. As a last step you can convert the whole comp back to log if you wish.

Color management in AE is pretty hard to work with, which is one of the reasons I switched to Fusion a long time ago! Nuke simplifies the process a bit in much the same way blender does by applying automatic conversions on import based on file type, but I actually like doing it manually.

[jordanbutfromSA]

Luckily I said it out loud the other day while watching some older corridor videos: "Man I wish Peter did tutorials and stuff. That would be awesome to watch and learn from" - Literally the next day your videos were suggested to me xD - Please don't stop making tutorials here and

[LFPAnimations]

A few crucial steps missed here that I think are worth adding to the flow chart. Before the tracking phase use a program like nuke (you could use the free version) to undistort your shot and render it out with extra resolution at the edges so you don't lose detail. Back in comp, redistort your CG on top of the footage. Seems small, but this will drastically improve solve error for wide angle lenses.
Also in davinci resolve use a rec709 -> linear lut (or whatever appropriate colorspace conversion) to export all footage as linear EXR sequence with DWAA compression. This will give you more flexible files to work with. That is pretty much how I do things at work.

Other than those two notes this is a great workflow. You may want to consider node based software like fusion or nuke since AE can be extremely inefficient long term.

[shigalarson]

I know you don’t really make videos about your music but it would be really cool to see some of your workflows for making music. I absolutely adore your style and recently started dipping my toes into synths and music production

[SianaGearz]

Wow he just gives us the poster as-is in high resolution, no "sign up to my spam mailing list" bullshit. Very nice, very kind of you.

[JJ_Lawson_VFX]

That "build proxy" thing annihilated me. No more time spent running 20+ sequences through AME just for viewport playback. Thanks, Peter!

[crazesnipes]

I am a 17 year old just getting into VFX, This answered alot of questions about how to start the compositing sequence. I didn't think of making the film transparent than adding it afterword's in composite. Thanks for the video

[-Michiro]

Bro your the world's Best VFX artist I know in the whole your videos and it's so simple....

[loganseibold]

Peter if VFX doesn’t work out you have a career in advertising with us
- Micro Center CEO

[Enolavisten]

So cool to see you have your own channel. Love your work in corridor crew and thankful that you are working with blender. Looking forward to the content you produce.

[emersonvernon]

this was incredibly helpful thank you!

[JulianValentine]

Killer tutorial dude! So sick meeting you at the CD Office a few weeks ago as well, look forward to seeing more content from ya!

[bentheremedia]

Man thank you so much!! I’ve been dying to get into this but it’s felt overwhelming at times. So many different tutorials trying to learn these steps. You’re a legend!

[filmedbyfranz]

Definitely needed this! It is very hard to find such proper pipelines from start to finish. So, Nanni-Arigato-Danke!

[akeem]

This was explained very simply. That background music reminds me of Age of Empires.

[canelaprod]

You're slowly morphing into Ian 🤣
Great compact tutorial as usual 👌

[MrPool-fkll]

Your voice is so match with satoru gojo's eng dub voice !!