[image title=”img_2841″ size=”medium” id=”571″ align=”right” linkto=”[site_url]/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_2841.jpg” ]One of the areas that we offer courses on this term at fxphd is Red in Production. One interesting aspect of this course for me personally was comparing notes with the Knowing team at Animal Logic about keying and tracking the Red footage. On Red Dwarf we had more green screen than AL did on Knowing, but boy AL had harder tracking shots – especially the 3 min plane crash continuous shot.

For all the discussion about the internet re: rolling shutter and the problems for 3D tracking, we managed to track our various shots without problems. The tracking team on Red Dwarf was headed up by Yannick Meillier – who did an outstanding job for our team.

When it came to greenscreen – Red Dwarf had a fair amount it must be said. There are some 262 effects shots in the three shows that air this weekend – but the shows are only 23- 24 mins long so that is an average of 262 shots over 71 minutes or more than 3.5 effects shots a minute for the whole show – excluding titles. Certainly not all, but many of these featured green screen.

Thanks to a great effort from the camera department, the effects team was provided with very good material to key from. As you might expect from an fxphd project – the green screen was shot around 50 IRE, with daylight balanced lighting – resulting in footage that what one seasoned feature film compositor called “the best greenscreen for keying” they had seen in years.

One can do a lot of testing and work up theories but in the end it is nice to see the RED ONE providing excellent footage for vfx work on such a scale. We are proud that we can now show complex and very real, hard core pipelines built directly on the best practice instructions we have been teaching in fxphd classes since the Red One launched.

There are multiple courses the April 09 term at fxphd.com on both Red Dwarf and the Red One camera.
Knowing will be covered in both fxphd and in the next upcoming fxguidetv ep.