Inspired by Tom Jelfs’ “Blend That Film” Cloning tutorial, I had a good time producing a composite output using three pieces of footage. I wanted to share what I learned, and see if anyone had suggestions for improvement:
- The lighting between my three takes, even though they were filmed consecutively with minimal interruption, was different enough to be seen in the final composite footage. I attempted some manual color balancing to minimize the effect, but there was no way to do that effectively for the whole film. In the future, if I was really concerned about matching the shots, I would be more conscientious about controlling the lighting (i.e. no natural daylight).
- The leather couch in the shot changed its form enough between takes that it was noticeable in the final result. I would pay closer attention to the setting, and eliminate hard-to-control elements like leather upholstery if they might create inconsistencies between shots.
- I came across a handy application, the AoA Audio Extractor, when finishing the soundtrack. This software allowed me to pull the audio track off each of my three original clips. I then dropped each track into an Audacity project and created a single audio file to merge with the frame sequence output by Blender. The audio and video was combined using VirtualDubMod.
The result can be viewed at http://manicviii.blogspot.com/2012/02/cloning.html