Visual Effects
Review:
Ribbit Films Pre-Keyed Assets, Pg. 2
When you buy a collection, you will get between 18-25 clips that loosely relate to a topic, like “Dance” or “Business.” I say loosely, because it seemed like they got a lot of actors and props in one area and then shot a number of these collections in a few days, trying to figure out places to put them all after the fact. For example, if you purchase the Business collection, you will likely expect to see people in business suits doing business-like things. While there are definitely clips of people shaking hands, exploring a new proposal, and talking on cell phones, there are also three clips of a business man juggling balls and bats, three clips of a woman in an ice cream suit dancing, and one clip of a group of business people running off to play. Considering there are only 22 clips in the collection, having a third of the clips so tentatively connected to the topic seems strange.
These pre-keyed assets can be used for a variety of creative uses, including creating a very good imitation of an iPod commercial using your favorite compositor's Levels options..
Placing these three dancers on a changing-color background, I decreased the levels to make them silhouettes and doubled the playback speed (to a normal rate of 30P).
Another example of this is in the “Crowds” collection. Of the 18 clips included in this collection, only 11 of the clips are ones most people would think of as crowds of the sort you might see in an audience. The other seven are people passing one another in the street or two people talking quietly.
The “Crowds” collection leads us to another issue that pops up in the “variety” area. This issue regards how many different people are employed as extras. In the “Crowds” collection, there’s never a crowd of more than 5 people and, with apparently one exception, they all look to be the same five people. This wouldn’t be that big of a problem if they were all dressed differently in each shot, because then you could combine crowds to make larger crowds. Unfortunately, they are almost always dressed identically. And while some outfits might be forgettable enough for you to get away with blending groups, there is one woman who is wearing a bright orange shirt in ten of the eleven groupings. This means that you simply cannot combine the footage she is in with any of the other group shots, unless you’re darkening your crowd down to mere silhouettes. (This is not commonly the goal.)
Rather dark shadows beneath some of the actors' feet from time to time will require additional rotoscoping after the fact.
Quality
The overall quality of these clips is quite good and is shot in 720 x 1280 HD format, for a fair number of sizing options. With the ease of scaling these clips, I was able to blend the clips with other footage and have a pretty realistic composite, as long as I paid attention to lighting concerns and did my best to adjust it when needed.
The actual clips were recorded at 60 fps, which means they play back natively in 50% slo-mo. (Plus, if you use some of After Effects TimeWarp options, you can even double the playback slowness with minimal artificacts. Unfortunately, if you just need normal speed clips, you lose half your duration immediately, which means that an 18 second clip is now only 9 seconds in duration.)
