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camera viewfinder. They'll see the part of the frame corresponding to the aspect
ratio of the movie in the theater, as well as a TV-safe area. Productions are now
designed to be targeted to different types of media without any intervention, to
avoid the noticeable pan-and-scans you used to see when movies were shown on
TV in the eighties. It's also much better now that the 16:9 HDTV aspect ratio is closer
to the movie aspect ratios than standard-definition video was, so letterboxing is less
obnoxious.
Lambert: For the movie we're working on now,
Jack the Giant Killer
, they're film-
ing it using the RED Epic camera, with 5K resolution. We're going to be taking a
portion out of this huge frame, which is exciting. We can see the regions corre-
sponding to the 2.39 cinema release, the proposed 16:9 TV release, and we have
extra information on the sides of the plates that will help in the stereo conver-
sion. We're using the extra information from the top and bottom as well, because
there are giants in this movie, and when they hit the ground, the camera shakes,
and we'll be able to pull in information from pixels that are out of frame instead of
making it up.
This is the first time we've had this kind of oversize plate. There are so many pixels
that for the TV release they may not even use the 16:9 rectangle but blow up a piece
of the actual 2.39 cinema release. With a normal camera, you can get away with a
blow-up up to about fifteen to twenty percent. On this show, they're shooting at 5K,
5120
2700, but actually rendering the show at half that resolution, they're actually
reframing some of the shots, knowing that they can zoom into the shot because they
have this exceptional resolution. I've got a plate that just came in with 170 percent
blow-up, which I've never seen before, but because you have the extra resolution you
can do that.
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David Geoghegan, Flame operator at LOOK Effects in Los Angeles, California, dis-
cusses the compositing involved in a pair of shots from
Captain America: The First
Avenger
.
Geoghegan: The setup here is that one of Captain America's team runs out of the for-
est to a road. He lies down in the middle of the road as an armored truck approaches,
and just as it rolls over him, he places a bomb on its underside. So here, the A side is
just a stationary camera in the middle of the road that the truck drives over, and the
B side is a moving camera that follows the guy as he runs out of the forest, lies down
in the empty road, and raises his hands up to place the bomb. Since the B side is
moving, we had to get a really good camera track, which wasn't so bad because they
put lots of markers on trees in the forest — but then you have to go back and paint
out all the markers.
The key problem is getting the truck plate to really “live” in the other plate. Luckily,
they shot both plates in the same location, but the color is very different in the two
shots. I did a really tight roto of the truck from the A side so I could pull it completely
off. Then before putting it into the B side, I had to color-correct it, “slip” or alter the
timing, and flop it — that is, reverse it left to right. I had to recreate the shadowing
