I'm thinking of a taking a crack at making an open matte project based on a few sources but I'm confused on how people achieve such seamless blending. I consider myself pretty well versed when it comes to video and post production but fail to see how people combine different sources found online to create more picture.

In the example below you can see three sources. I have no idea how it's possible even with manual eye matching to blend these 3 sources perfectly. Also, are people doing this kind of work with every shot manually? Maybe this is more work then I signed up for!

I've read a few threads in here but fail to see how any software can algorithmicly combine sources perfectly without a human touch.

Any insights welcome!

What movie is this out of curiosity?

It's almost impossible to blend two sources manually, as almost all the time the frames "move" from a shot to another - and sometimes even within the same shot. But with autooverlay is easier!

Still, you need to have two sources with similar colors and contrast, possibly without logos; three are very hard to combine...

My advice: if you use avisynth, take a look at autooverly and spend some (read: A LOT OF!) time tweaking and testing; in some instances you will get a nice blend, other times you will just give up!

(2020-10-08, 09:06 AM)SpaceBlackKnight Wrote: What movie is this out of curiosity?

I think it's The Rock?

yeah its The Rock. you can see Nic Cage in his hazmat suit on the left

Yes sorry should have said in the post, its from The Rock and I thought it would be amazing to have as much picture as you see above. However, its also an Michael Bay action movie with 46093847630984764098436 cuts.

(2020-10-08, 09:06 AM)SpaceBlackKnight Wrote: What movie is this out of curiosity?

(2020-10-08, 09:53 AM)spoRv Wrote: It's almost impossible to blend two sources manually, as almost all the time the frames "move" from a shot to another - and sometimes even within the same shot. But with auto overlay is easier!

Still, you need to have two sources with similar colors and contrast, possibly without logos; three are very hard to combine...

My advice: if you use avisynth, take a look at auto overlay and spend some (read: A LOT OF!) time tweaking and testing; in some instances you will get a nice blend, other times you will just give up!

I'm pretty familiar with post prod tools outside of avisynth. And in that world its honestly pretty rare to find something that could auto overlay images like that.

Like I'm honesty surprised that auto-overlay works if it is truly analyzing the pixels and neighboring references to warp and place pixels aligned perfectly at that level. What you see above is me lining up sources in after effects with minor correction curves applied to try and bring them closer to the main grade of the blu ray.

(2020-10-08, 04:53 PM)CORTICALSYSTEMS Wrote: What you see above is me lining up sources in after effects with minor correction curves applied to try and bring them closer to the main grade of the blu ray.

The problem is, maybe only 0.01% of movies need just one "set&forget" alignment, while all the others change frame position for almost all shots... without talking about manually aligning three different sources!  

Note: sometimes sources does not align because from different masters, hence rotations and/or warps lead them to be VERY hard (if not impossible) to let the align - but this seems not the case with "The Rock", at least according to the screenshot. Then, for the logos removal... good luck!

yeahhhhhhhhh..........probably going to pass on this idea. lol


Maybe we crowd source it out everyone takes a shot......... jk or am I ?