Film Opening - Blog Post #22

I Think Volumetric Lighting Hates Me

        Hello everyone! As you can tell from the title of this blog post, the new method I found for the volumetric lighting did not work as planned. I was really excited to try this new approach (especially since it looked so promising) but unfortunately, I ran into some problems with the effects needed to make it happen. Let me explain this so you guys can understand what went wrong.

        Basically, like the last method, I needed to track the footage using the 3D Camera Tracker effect on Adobe After Effects. This effect allows points to be added and tracked throughout the duration of the footage, allowing the editor to create a 3D camera within the scene, solids (like in the last approach), null objects, and more. In this method, I had to create a 3D camera and null object, create an adjustment layer with radial blur and slight color correction, and then attach this adjustment layer to the null object I created from some of the tracked points I made with the 3D Camera Tracker effect (it sounds very complicated, but it is actually quite simple). Now, in order to explain what went wrong, I will show you the clip that I was trying to apply the effect to:

As you can see in this shot, there are many areas that are either overexposed or underexposed. 

We had struggled with finding the right exposure for the shot while filming, but eventually 

found something that worked - despite our efforts, however, the shot's exposure was something 

that caused problems later in editing. 

        I was luckily able to get the volumetric lighting effect to work in the first half of the footage. This is what it looked like without any additional editing:

It might not seem like much of a difference, but it was definitely a step forward. After adding
this basic effect, I was planning on making it look slightly more realistic by playing with the radial
blur settings as well as adding some dust overlays. Before I did this, however, I wanted to apply
the effect to the second part of the footage. This is where more issues came up.

        Sadly, because of the notable contrast between over and under exposed objects within the shot, the second half of the clip was basically un-trackable (since points could not be found and tracked). This caused a warning to pop up while I was editing:

        I thought this was an error on my part rather than an actual problem with the footage, so I sat in front of my computer for over two hours trying to solve this issue. I tried to create a point and then manually track it throughout the footage, which did not work. I also tried to use points from other parts in the clip (such as the wall that was nowhere near the source of the light, which was where the points were supposed to be located) and just move them over, however that proved to be useless as well. Here is a picture of that:

Though it is difficult to see in the picture, I used three points from the wall near the
entrance in order to  create the 3D camera and null object that I needed to achieve the
volumetric light effect. Once those two were created, I was planning on simply
moving their position to the light source in the second half of the shot.
Sadly, this did not work either.

        As you can probably guess, I became very frustrated and decided to contact my group mates after hours of unsuccessful attempts to fix the issue. After some discussion, we realized that the effect itself did not add much to the film opening and that therefore, we should no longer try to achieve this effect. This felt very unsatisfying - especially after working on it for so long and going through so much trouble to make it happen - but I am relieved to hear that I do not have to worry about it anymore. Since this is no longer an issue, the only thing we need to finish is the audio! We definitely plan on finishing this early next week, so I will post an update as soon as we finish. Even without the volumetric lighting, I think our final project will be quite decent, so I am excited to see the finished result! I will post an update when something new happens. Thanks for reading!