Have you ever watched a movie with breathtaking landscapes, gorgeous castles or giant buildings in the middle of nowhere that makes you ask yourself “How did they do that?” . Well there is a technique in video editing called “Compositing” which allows you to do that. In fact compositing has grown so much during the last few years, that it is accepted to be not only a technique but a whole new kind of art.
Compositing is basically placing together visual elements from different sources, putting them together and making them look like they are parts of the same scene. It is a very powerful function because you can save a lot of money from going and shooting in different locations around the world. Let’s say that you want to have the Statue of Liberty in your video. You need to travel to USA, take a shot at it and put it in your video. Instead of doing it and spend all that money, you can simply take image from the internet (stock photo sites), compose it nicely in your footage and animate it, simple as that.
If you want to create a high quality, professional compositing though this will not be enough. If you have people in your footage is much harder to compose, because you can affect them, and make them look unnatural. That is why either you have to be extremely good in digital image manipulation or you have to use the help of the green screen (or sometimes blue). There are many types of software out in the market which can be used for professional compositing. Some of them are: Autodesk Combustion, Inferno, Flame and Flint, Nuke, Adobe AE etc.
I would advise you, if you are interested in compositing to start with the Adobe products, first of all because they are a lot cheaper, and secondly you can find thousands of tutorials on the internet.
Compositing is very big part of 21st century cinema, and especially combined with 3D animation it gives remarkable results. Imagine that you can take digital image of a jungle, let’s say and by compositing and animation you can make a video how your friends are in the middle of it, and trying to find the way out.
The links below are short videos of how compositing can change the visual concept of movies, and combined with 3D can give incredible results. Enjoy !
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Hristiyan Stratev – Mediazone Tv & Avid Lab – Lab Assistant
