We’ve all been there. We have a great concert scene in our film that takes place at a local college theater. The hero plays one last encore and the woman he’s longed for all through the movie rushes up on stage and kisses him hard on the lips. It’s a great, feel-good ending to your music epic.
Unfortunately, when you shot the scene, the fifty extras you thought you’d lined up to be the audience turned out to be more like 8 semi-fried co-eds with hangovers. And then, if that weren’t bad enough, the rhythm guitarist never showed up. As such, you had to shoot the scene with the bassist, the vocalist, the drummer, and a skeleton crowd. Now the scene’s virtually unusable. If only there was a way to correct it after the fact!
Well, with the advent of more powerful greenscreen technology, this is becoming more and more solvable. While greenscreen technology may make it solvable, it still takes a lot of work. And since the film you’re working on isn’t a sci-fi/fantasy film that uses large amounts of greenscreen, setting up the careful lighting and keying for just a few shots can be a very tedious proposition.
Enter Ribbit Films. They’ve found a way to allow you to augment your film with greenscreen footage without having to acquire and key it yourself. You can buy their clips a la carte or in collections. With that said, let’s get into the specifics about them.
Need extras for a film? Simply drag and drop Ribbit's Pre-Keyed stock footage into a scene. Of course, you will have to tweak the lighting to try to match the background scene.
Ease of Use
While the concept of these clips is to simplify your life, your initial acquisition of them is going to be a little unusual. Rather than giving you clips in QuickTime or .AVI formats, they instead send clips as .ZIP files that are composed of separate, Alpha-channel .TGA files. These stacks of images can be interpreted as footage, by After Effects CS3/CS4, Motion 2, and by Photoshop CS3/CS4 Extended. (While the images are able to be interpreted as footage in Photoshop, the actual alpha channel doesn’t appear to come through. As such, you’ll want to work on these only in After Effects or Motion.) Once you’ve brought in/imported the image stack as footage, you can tell the program you’re using what frame rate you wish to use and then resize the footage in anyway you see fit. (The fact that you have more control is why Ribbit Films chose to go the way of still images, rather than pre-interpreted footage.)
While using the TGA stacks isn’t terribly complicated, it is a bit unwieldy to find your way around if you’ve purchased one of the complete collections of footage. This is because there is no interface for the DVDs you buy, but is instead simply a number of .ZIP files on each disk. You’ll download all the .ZIP files to your hard drive and then have to unzip them all to make them easily accessible. (This will essentially double the size of each collection to about 14 Gigs.) Unfortunately, they don’t give you a .JPG thumbnail or a compressed video clip in the top folder to make it easy to see what each clip is. If you don’t want to go to their website to look at a quick video clip of each folder you purchased, you’ll have to open up one of the .TGAs in Photoshop or Bridge to jog your memory. It would make things much easier to use if they would include a thumbnail and a compressed video clip that could easily be viewed in Windows or Mac’s Navigator.
While there are a lot of cool uses for Ribbit's pre-keyed assets, their tendency to use the same actors, ressed in the same clothes, makes it difficult to reuse different shots and angles for larger crowd scenes.
Variety
If you buy the different clips online, there are hundreds of clips to choose from, ranging from skateboarders pulling tricks, to gymnasts leaping, dancers swaying, business people talking, to rock stars performing. The overall variety is good, but if you want to save money by buying actual collections, things become a little strange.
