- [Ben] Hello and welcome to this Silhouette tutorial.
My name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX
and we are gonna be taking a look
at a new concept in Silhouette 2022;
the Surface
and how we can use this
within our tracking and transforms
and possibly more importantly
how we can also use it to speed up our compositing.
(music)
(dramatic impact)
(rushing air)
(whooshing)
Okay and here is the shot that we're gonna be working on;
and we are going to be replacing
this yellow poster in the background.
Now I've already got a tracker here;
and if we take a little look at this
I've got this tracked in
got the two shapes that I used for tracking;
I have my transform data in the matrix
just as we would do normally.
So if we take a look at our object parameters
you'll see that I have a corner pin.
That was the traditional way of doing
the four corner pin distort on the layer itself
and you can see as I move the corner pin around
that it actually changes up the layer.
I'm just gonna undo that.
Because underneath this corner pin
we have this new parameter called the Surface.
And if you've worked with Mocha before
then you'll already know about the concept of the surface.
So let's see how this works in Silhouette.
I'm gonna come up above my viewer
and I'm gonna turn on my surface control right here.
And you'll see that I get a blue box
just as we had in Mocha.
And if I move
the corners of the blue surface;
take a look at what doesn't happen to my layer.
So the layer itself remains in place.
So what I'm doing instead
is I'm transforming just the surface
and I can transform it directly on the viewer
or using the parameters in the bottom right;
and I can use that to move my surface into place.
And I'll do this just to line up with the poster.
So now I have surface data
for where I want to put the poster in there.
But if I play this back
you'll see the way the layer looks
is a little bit more kind of consistent.
So the nice thing about this;
it avoids the layer kind of turning in on itself
when we're trying to do a lot of heavy lifting
with a corner pin.
Very handy!
So now if I want to come in and replace my poster
with something here.
All I have to do is come into my Transform;
I'll add a Transform onto here,
put the tracker inside here,
and I can go into Transform.
Under Transform we have an extra mode
we have the Match Move and the Stabilize
that we're familiar with
but we also have Insert;
and Insert is gonna place our clip within a surface.
So I can choose my yellow poster;
There we go lovely!
That looks like it's taking in
the movement of the yellow poster.
Let's have a look at that as a comp.
Yeah looking pretty good!
If we take a look at this node that I've got
coming in from my main comp;
I've actually got a nice little alpha channel
coming in through here that I've already created
with a bit of roto to cut out the girl's head.
So if I pipe that in into my composite;
take a little look there.
That's gonna play back for us.
Have a little look here
at the speed that this is compositing.
So it's moving forward but it is sort of
chonking along a little bit
'cause there's another thing that we can do
with that surface data;
and that is with the DOD node.
So I'm gonna place a DOD node after our main footage.
So this is the Domain of Definition
and you'll probably have seen this and worked with this
if you've used Silhouette before.
Now if you're eagle eyed
you will have seen that the DOD
now has a data port in to it as well.
So what I can do is I can take this data from the tracker
and pipe this into my DOD.
And in the node parameters I can choose the yellow poster
as my DOD layer and what this is gonna do
it's gonna automatically set the DOD
to the limits of that surface.
(tapping keyboard) So now if we come back
and have a look at the composite node
back down here again;
you'll notice that because we're actually looking
at far fewer pixels than we were before.
Everything here is processing really really quickly
and we haven't really had to think about anything.
So not only is it focusing our attention
to the area that we're working on
but it's also speeding up the render times.
And I can make all the other little changes I need to;
just blurring that,
making the color correction
and I'll end up with my final result here.
All made a lot faster and more convenient
using the new Surface within Transform
and linking tracking data to my DOD.
I hope this has been helpful for you!
My name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX
(music fading in) and I will see you again
very soon.
If you've enjoyed this
and you'd like to learn more about Silhouette;
head on over to borisfx.com
for hours of free tutorials on Silhouette
and all of the Boris FX products.
You'll also be able to download a free trial version
to start working with it yourself.
(music continues)