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3.06.2008

With Great Power...

...comes great awesomeness.

I've know about the power of "difference mattes" for a long time, but I hadn't been able to get it to really work for me until today.

A Difference Matte takes two similar images and then cuts out only what is different between the two. So, if you get a good Plate of your scene, and then do something in that frame, you should be able to have the computer cut that out relatively easily. This is the power of visual effects where something flies into a scene, stops, and then the characters walk around it.

At least, that's the theory.

Well, for MathTacular4 we are doing some pretty awesome stuff. While shooting on a race track, we ran into a problem: Beer and other ads that we didn't want.

Initially I just blurred everything out. But that really ruined the feel of the shot because some things were "out of focus" and the actors next to these signs were not. Then I created an overlay to replace the signs with MathTacular ads.


Adding Digital Ads

Cool.

But our actors walked in front of one of the signs. What to do?

I decided to give the "difference matte" another shot. And, amazingly, it worked. Certainly not perfectly, but definitely good enough for this shot.

Check it out.


The Power of a Difference Matte

Awesomeness.

~Luke Holzmann
Your Media Production Mentor

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