
Originally Posted by
MumblesBadly
Have you tried making the background also greyscale to avoid the uncanny valley affect? Or is there a "depth of field" affect you can use on the background versus blurring?
Also, what do you edit in? I use a Mac and fiddle a little with a consumer version of Final Cut.
I don't interview poker players for a living anymore.
Uncanny valley shouldn't apply as those weren't CGI backgrounds. It was real footage taken from the halls and stages of the Rio. I wasn't actually allowed to film in those locations, but it was easy to sneak a few minutes of background footage to use later. Grayscale would look odd, unless you mean tinting it slightly. Maybe these could have been color corrected better to match the foreground.
Depth of field creates a particular sort of blur, one that's difficult to apply to existing footage. Suppose the camera's focal point is 20 feet. Any object at that distance will be sharp and in focus. An object 15 or 25 feet away will be slightly fuzzy. An object 5 feet away or 200 feet away will be very blurry. As far as my computer is concerned, the footage is 2-dimensional and it has no way of knowing how distant any objects are. When you add any sort of blur, it gets applied evenly to the whole thing.
What I should have done is compensated for this by getting someone to stand in front of the camera first, focus on them, then have them walk away, and use a shallow depth of field (exaggerating the blur and sensitivity to distance). Instead, I think the DoF was deep, making the overall image focused, which is why I had to blur it later.
In my defense, I had never operated a camera at the time and didn't have much time to learn all this stuff.
I mostly use Adobe products, namely Premiere and After Effects.