Adobe Premiere

This for anyone who uses this - If I wanted to "clone" someone, what is the best way to do it. The idea is a room, then one person walks in, then his clone walks in and this keeps happening until the room is filled with clones of this guy.

I tried doing it the same way as you would make a ghost but it didn't quite work. Any ideas?

To do it effectively you'll need a blue screen.

I have that but I was hoping not to use it as it takes too long. If you set up the camera in the one position and didn't move it, while filming the same actor in diferent positions within the shot, couldn't you then overlap it using Premiere?
The background should stay the same but the actor will be in different places. Or is this wrong?

No, I think the perspective of the background would change too..and that's not what you want.

If the camera is static with, a wide enough field of focus then it should be OK. I've applied that trick to static imagery in the past, but not to moving image. Persepective of background won't change if background and camera are both static.

The only problem is the overlaps of background to person between layers, you would need to do a lot of clean up else parts of the background would show up as double exposures on the composite.

I think Raz was more on the nose with his blue screen technique to be honest.

Wow, you people are smart when it comes to special effects, I'm impressed! 😮‍💨

And if you have time to spare, you can cut out one person in one sequence in Photoshop, frame by frame. 😄

Hmmmm, I think that might be a little too time consuming. 😂

KJ, are you going for a kind of George Micheal, Mary K Blige video effect here? (Sorry, can't remember the name of the song, but I'm sure you know what I mean.)

Cool. Get it online when you're done.

Yeah, if you didnt move the camera or the depth of the field of view then the background would stay the same. But if your gonna go to that much trouble in editing, you might as well make it easy on yourself and take a still of the background then do both actors in bluescreen.

You can set one up with a large blue sheet and have it well lit. It shoul;d work well enough for those needs, because you'd be cutting and pasting anyway.

BTW, my friend who made A Question Of Faith (a fan film I'm working on the sequal to) said he did all the lightsabers frame by frame in Photoshop, and he said it took forever! So that may not be the way you'd want to go at all.

I think that's what they do at Lucasfilm as well though... I dunno, but I can't figure out how else they're going to do it. If any of you guy know, do tell.

At the previous production company I once worked for, they had finished editing a 30 minute programme when the commisioning editor noticed there were too many brand names visible. This is not allowed due to regulations on advertising on public television. Now, all these shots were filmed hand-held with a lot of movement. The editor had to go through the programme and put a blurry patch over these brand names, frame by frame. I'm so happy I'm not an editor. 😄

I think Lucasfiln just plot the path of the blad frame by frame and then automate the effect through proprietry software.

Probably something like that. Still a lot of frame by frame work. And then they have to make the flashes as well, allthough that's just one or two frames per hit.

LFL and ILM have it a bit easer this time around.
They have made some special equipment that attaches to the camera and tells the computer where the camera is and the focal length for every frame. They also have referance points on the wall (the yellow post-it note looking things you may have seen) that are also imputed into the computer so they get all their informatin real time and so the wont have to do any guess work or even have to go frame by frame.

All that info then goes to ILM where the backgrounds are rendered in 3d and then placed into the shot. Along wth any extra actors or CGI effects.

Yep, that's the ARRI tripod head that stores ALL the info of the camera. Very good stuff that. That way you can make numerous shots for one final shot and shoot the in EXACTLY the same way.

I think the software does all that too. There was an Episode-I documentary a while back where they talked about the new method for making the blades and the old one.

The sabres from the 70/80's had little motors in the handles that made the blades rotate to give the shimmer effect.

They showed an Episode-I scene with only the saber blades, it was from Maul/OB1 battle.

As to the time, well that's one reason why Post takes over 18 months....

Exactly, they have a lot of people working on these effects. It's still a lot of manual labor, even though it's all on a computer these days.

Also Queeg, if you could have used the new Avid on that, it would have been easy to erase all those signs.

They have a feature that grabs like frames and remembers them so you can use that for a quick edit of any background piece that you dont want, or even use it to make a steady cam effect to stop the motion of the camera and make it look as if it was shot on a tripod. Cool stuff, I can't wait to get one (saves money for 10 years starting now) they cost upwards of $10k!!!

It's a cool technique. Especially the "camera shake" removal. Rather than having to plot points, the S/W automatically plots them itself for removal. Very cool.

I've never heard of the handle's having motors. ANH they had a phosphorescent bar that was actually wired with electricity, but they were too expensive and they broke a lot. ESB and ROTJ had a different method, but they were still wired at times to make the spark.

Now they use mainly wooden sticks, and do it all in CG.