Compositing for VFX (Foundary Nuke) Course

Duration: 30 Hours

The whole course is 30 hours, but each student is only allowed to enrol in the first stage for only 10 hours. Students cannot apply for a Certificate until 30 hours have elapsed.

Compositing is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Live-action shooting for compositing is variously called “blue screen,” “green screen,” “chroma-key,” and other names. Today, most, though not all, compositing is achieved through digital image manipulation. Pre-digital compositing techniques, however, go back as far as the trick films of Georges Méliès in the late 19th century; and some are still in use. In TV studio practice, blue or green screens may back newsreaders so that stories can be composited behind them, before being switched to full-screen display.

In other cases, presenters may be completely within compositing backgrounds that are replaced with entire “virtual sets” executed in computer graphics programs. In sophisticated installations, subjects, cameras, or both can move about freely while the computer-generated environment changes in real-time to maintain correct relationships between the cameras, subjects, and virtual “backgrounds.” Virtual sets are also used in motion pictures, some of which are photographed entirely in blue or green screen environments; for example, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

More commonly, composited backgrounds are combined with sets – both full-size and models – and vehicles, furniture, and other physical objects that enhance the “reality” of the composited visuals. “Sets” of almost unlimited size can be created digitally because compositing software can take the blue or green colour at the edges of a backing screen and extend it to fill the rest of the frame outside it. That way, subjects recorded in modest areas can be placed in large virtual vistas. Most common of all, perhaps, are set extensions: digital additions to actual performing environments. In the film, Gladiator, for example, the arena and first-tier seats of the Roman Coliseum were actually built, while the upper galleries (complete with moving spectators) were computer graphics, composited onto the image above the physical set.

For motion pictures originally recorded on film, high-quality video conversions called “digital intermediates” are created to enable compositing and the other operations of computerized post-production. Digital compositing is a form of matting, one of four basic compositing methods. The others are physical compositing, multiple exposures, and background projection. In this short program, you will work with Autodesk Composite 2011, and NUKE like a professional expert in media industries.