Lightsaber tips

When I roto sabers in my video (AE), the sabers look fine, however, there is one problem. When I play back the video, the saber seems to jump from frame to frame, and it looks really fake. How do you keep your sabers steady when played back at 30fps?

 

Practice.

 

"Practice" ?

You can do it a million times, but until you know what you're doing wrong and can fix it, you'll do it wrong a million times.

 

Maybe try keyframing them.

I think you just need a little practice. Is it jumpy when it's moving around or just when it's standing still?

 

If you're working at 15fps, try importing at at least 25, ideally 29.97.

 

A good tip I got from Brandon was to use beziers to round edges.

 

Basically you have to roto every single frame. Otherwise, there will be gaps and stuff

 

Actually (and I learned this from Primrodo), I learned that- if you're using AE- use Ryan_W's tutorial, make sure you use keyframes, and then add a median of about 2. The former should help with jumpiness; the latter should round the sabers without any messy beziers.

 

It'll round them a litte. Enough not to give you a papercut. But it's merely the morning-after pill. You gotta go with the bezier-cond...-

Pre-emptive Chris-edit here.

Anyway, my thoughts.

 

The problem could be that your depending 2 much on the keyframes. I usually set a 3-5 frame keyframe. But then cycle back over those frames and make adjustments for everything to line up and angle the way it should.

 

Educated Guess: You are filming in interlaced (60 fields), but rotoing in progressive (30 frames, i.e. deinterlaced by AE), then putting the progressive 30 frames on top of the 60 fields, giving you sabers that seem to have half the framerate of the live action.

The fix: Deinterlace the live action as well.

/Z

 

Good thought Zap

 

Its not the Technical stuff thats messing it up (fps, or fields) rather, I get a sort of jitter when its played back, the saber seems to "jump" a little further than it would realistically. I use Beziers to smooth out the curves and such, but its the playback where the blade looks good, but the beam seems to move more drastically. An example: Lets say someone moves the stick slowly and gradually, then when you roto it, the blade seems to jump around more than the stick does. Could this be because I have zoomed in to about 400% to roto? How do I smooth out the keyframes? do I remove some of the keyframes?

Thanks guys

 

No zooming would have nothing to do with that. Could it be that you may have slightly moved the comp. And the saber is not lined up right?