Color change- fairly advanced

[malcolmsweb]

Greetings everyone, I don't know whether or not you've seen any of the 'Children of Dune' movie on sci-fi, or promos, but if so.. you'll know about the blue eye effect they employ for the characters.
I tried to replicate this effect by importing raw footage, tripling it to three identical layers in the timeline, and masking each eye (one eye for each layer), color correct the iris i just masked, then tracking the pupil in the original footage. This doesn't seem right- theres gotta be an easier way to do it. If you have any ideas, or know more about how it was done for the movie, let me know. Thanks

[kiwi]

In the original DUNE movie, they rotoscoped the blue eyeball effect BY HAND - FRAME-BY-FRAME!!!!!

We've got it easy with the tracker -

Why 3 layers?

KIWI

[malcolmsweb]

i used three layers so that when i mask one eye (in the layer over the original), it would be over the raw footage, then the layer on top of that would hold the mask for the other eye. It's confusing- Thats were i think I'm going wrong with it.. I've never done anything quite the same, so i'm trying to find the most effiecient way of doing it. Rotoscoping frame by frame is insane, and you have to be paid in abundance to keep motivated. I wanna stay away from that option. heh.

[deke-kincaid]

As kiwi said:
"We've got it easy with the tracker - "

The pupil of the eyeball is perfect for tracking for close shots and just the plain whites of the eye for farther away shots(unless it is dark). Attach a small garbage mask to the tracker(little bigger than the eyes). Look through your channels and find the one with the most amount of contrast from the skin around the eyes to the eyeball(depending on the color of the actors skin). Then flatten out the detail of the skin and push it to black. Do the same thing with color of the eyeball. Now you have a mask to use in order to color in blue. Might have to erode the matte a little with darker skin person because of the contrast from light pink of the skin on the inside of the eyelids that show around the eyeballs.

Children of Dune was shot on HD so they had alot more resolution then if your working with just D1. So it may require some hand roto on faces that are further from the camera because of the lack of resolution to pull a track.

[malcolmsweb]

It works great! Trackers make life so much easier..that's for sure. Unfortunately, i was almost done with the screen test, and combustion actually failed and shut itself down. doh! But it won't take long to redo.
D1 is awful for tracking, but unfortunately i don't have the money for an upgrade at the moment. I was looking, and Panasonic makes some good dvcpro cinema cameras that are pretty hi-res, and they aren't too expensive. An HD cam would be so GREAT, but they are tens of thousands of $. My car was like $900. That says a lot. heh. thanks again.

[lioret]

Hi Beaker, when you say flatten out the detail what do you mean by that (what operators would i use) do you mean that I would scale (using levels or curves) the matte to loose some of the finer gray (lighter areas),as you say push it to black.

TIA for what might be a bit of a lame question still learning the lingo.

Chris