Sky Replacement Test Shots in After Effects
Test shots of our sky replacement work in Adobe After Effects for one of our short films, Samurai Dead. We composed background and sky replacements in Photoshop and After Effects and used Mocha, a built-in plug-in for AE, to track the cloudwork to the original footage. Check out a great tutorial on sky replacement from Video Copilot:
• After Effects Tutorial 42. Advanced Sky Re...
http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/
This is a before-and-after comparison video of the sky replacement work we did for our short zombie film, Samurai Dead. We filmed this video on a bright, cloudless day. Most of the skies in our original footage were either washed out or plain looking. In order to help enhance the quality of our film, we replaced the sky and background in most of our edited footage. We replaced the washed out sky with clouds and blue skies (before color grading). It was a lot of work and very time consuming, but it was well worth it. Check out our work and let us know what you think!
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To get a good sky replacement, it’s important that you build a good key around your original sky. It actually helps if your sky is blown out since there’s separation between the sky from the rest of your footage. That makes it much easier to key. Fortunately, most of our original footage had blown out sky. Once we got our video footage into the editing room, we basically followed the tutorial from Video Copilot step-by-step. We applied the “Colorama” filter to our footage in After Effects and used it built a matte. That worked about 60 to 70 percent of the time. When it did work, it worked beautifully. Using the colorama filter made it quick and easy to replace the sky. However, the colorama method didn’t work the other 30 to 40 percent of the time -- usually because there wasn’t clear separation between the sky and the rest of the footage. In these cases, we had to use the rotoscoping tool in After Effects to key out the sky, which was tedious and time consuming.
One of other keys to getting a good sky replacement is video tracking. We used Mocha, an extremely powerful tracking plugin that comes included with After Effects, to track our footage. Unlike the built-in tracking tool, Mocha allows you define a region or area of your footage (rather than just a point) for tracking. This makes it much easier to use and helps to produce more accurate tracks.
All footage in this video was shot with:
Canon Rebel T4i / 650D
Canon 18-135mm STM lens