Guidance for Advanced Visual Effects

[Haitham Lawati]

Guys, does anyone know websites that provide extensive information and tutorials regarding cinema tricks and advanced visual effects which are followed in high-end film making?

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Here's one of my favorites: VIDEO COPILOT | After Effects Tutorials, Plug-ins and Stock Footage for Post Production Professionals

[Haitham Lawati]

Thank you for the reply. In fact, I have been visiting this website since three years almost. I know it is a very humorous website and it is very interesting to follow up Andrew Kramer's marvelous tutorials. However, Andrew only concentrates on using After Effects for compositing and creating effects and sometimes 3D Studio Max.
Any other website that provides advanced stuff regarding video compositing and, visual effects and film tricks?

[Ammar Ijaz]

I'm in the same boat as you, actually. I wanna get a good overview of the various special effects programs out there and how they're used and haven't really found anything that does that. I've been reading through fxguide.com's breakdowns of vfx for movies I've seen and am learning a lot:

VFX roll call for The Avengers (updated) | fxguide
A Game of Shadows: more to the mystery | fxguide
Also go to youtube and search for "VFX breakdown" and the like.

Some names that keep popping up: Maya, Houdini, Nuke, colourgrading, 3D Studio Max, even occasionally Blender.

Some of the very high end stuff is basically kept secret or is in-house developed by vfx houses looking to keep their edge and apparently they specialize into niches and become, you know, "the fur people" or the "particle folk".

I recently started looking up photogrammetry which is just cool. Taking pictures of different angles and then converting them to a 3D model. I made a 3D model of a book today that way and I don't even know how to use Blender. Some apps: ImageModeler by Autodesk, PhotoModeler, Insight3D.

PhotoModeler's SmartMatch - YouTube

Two ways to get the "elements" you want to apply VFX to, you can either green screen them (super recommended) or rotoscope them out. Mocha (included in After Effects though there's also a pro version with more features) is used to "cut" people out to do things to them. I'm also really impressed by After Effect CS6's RotoBrush. It's a bit like magic.

Some cool set extension stuff:

Set-extension and Virtual Planes Demo - YouTube

To insert a 3D object into a regular 2D plane, you wanna use a matchmover/camera tracker/solver like the one Mocha has built in or After Effects or Syntheyes or Camera Tracker.

Also starting to understand the importance of sound effects to "selling" effects and also the importance of colour grading to make the effects blend in even more. For colour grading, Adobe Speedgrade is world class software though Resolve is apparently THE standard. Magic Bullet Looks is also great and used on shows like House.
Resolve reel:

2012 DaVinci Resolve Color Reel - YouTube

I've also been looking into using the Kinect to mocap.

[Jerry Karvasale]

I came across this website in another thread about learning advanced effects.

fxphd | visual effect and production training

Seems like they show you cool techniques over a wide variety of software if you are willing to pay for it.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Habibi, try the Foundry/Nuke website - the tutorials are thorough and comes with samples and exercises.

[James Huenergardt]

It all depends on what visual effects you are wanting to do.

These guys use After Effects and Photoshop for almost everything.
On occasion, they use Lightwave for some 3D modeling.

CHE - Crazy Horse Effects

After Effects is a very powerful program put in the right hands. Don't discount it.