Topic: Ski Jump Multiple Passes

For a little BTS fun, I uploaded the four passes that I combined to create the latest Winterlympic clip, the Ski Jump.
https://youtu.be/4BcKFEAregI
These are the passes as they were shot, before rig removal, compositing, and cropping. The first run is the skier, the second two are passes of the various skiers who have already crashed (I only had three sets of skis and wanted more than two failed skiers gone before) and finally the clean background plate pass, empty of all unnecessary elements to make rig removal easier. Final compositing was done in Photoshop, which is a pain to convert layers to frames, but is much easier to do the masking by erasing with Cintiq pen, and also has more compositing modes than Vegas. In this case I used "darker color" on the elements such as the broken skis against the snow, which still had to be garbage matted, then blended using that mode.

https://bricksafe.com/files/thistof/hillbillyheist/TofAnimation.png

Re: Ski Jump Multiple Passes

Really cool to see how much work went into a 14 second video. How did you go about masking out the rig but maintaining the skier's shadow?

Re: Ski Jump Multiple Passes

I put a mask channel on each frame of the skier and erased the rig and the rig's part of the shadow with a large soft brush, carefully leaving only the skier's shadow.

https://bricksafe.com/files/thistof/hillbillyheist/TofAnimation.png