[00:00] Whether it's a million tons of flying space debris crashing onto a planet as transforming extraterrestrial space robots like galactic wars against enemy alien sci-fi creatures, or they just kind of made a building so it would look different, CGI is used to some extent in almost all modern films.
[00:14] From obviously impossible fantasy to invisible effects, in either case, it takes teams of motivated, talented artists to assemble the shots and convince us all that the talking raccoon and his teenage tree friend could be real. And the final gatekeepers of it all, the soldiers in the last line of defense against client expectations and kickbacks, are the VFX compositors.
[00:31] These are the ones that assemble all of the CG elements together, blend it into the live-action footage, make it look real, and usually save a few 3D artist asses along the way when the renders don't quite hold up. So if you're interested in pursuing a career in TV and movies, or if you're just keen to find out about the behind-the-scenes and how this stuff makes its way from the director's vision to the silver screen,
[00:49] stay tuned to find out the secrets of VFX that your average weekend warrior VFX enthusiast might not know about. With that, let's delve into the software they use, the skills they need to have, what their typical day looks like, what the future has in store for them, and resources to help you embark on a path to join in on the fun.
[01:07] Some people refer to compositing as Photoshop or video, which might be a little bit reductive, but does kind of boil it down to its most essential form. The general idea of it being that compositors take all the necessary ingredients of a shot, be it the pre-footage, the CG renders, matte painting, supporting 2D elements,
[01:22] and cut and paste and blend them all together, adding in some extra spicy effects, until they've essentially got a completely believable image of an entirely made-up scene. What great compositors excel at is being able to fully break down how things look in the real world
[01:34] and coming up with ways to emulate that digitally, using these techniques to gradually build up a shot until it looks convincing, and arguably, more importantly, cinematic. As with any VFX job, chances are you're starting your morning at the coffee machine, because
[01:47] caffeine is to VFX artists what pixels are to an image. A relationship so intertwined, it's like trying to separate foreground from background without a good roto. Then, once locked into your workstation and ready to roll, you open up the production tracking software, take a look at the tasks assigned, and now that you know what you'll
[02:00] be tackling, it's time to dig up some references. If it's a lookdev or keyshot, then you'll likely be spending a solid chunk of the time serving the web for references from real life photography or, more often than not, shots from other movies with similar aesthetics. Otherwise you'll likely be matching the look established by another artist on those key shots.
[02:15] Next, you start gathering elements, pulling in your roto if you're not doing it yourself. You'll often receive a prepped plate from a roto or paint artist, meaning the footage you'll be working on, but with certain elements removed from it, like the cables on a stunt performer, or maybe a cameraman in a reflection.
[02:28] In some cases you might be handed a clean plate, which is footage of the exact same shot at the exact same camera angle and movement that they filmed on set, except without the actors or move-in props, so that it can be used to blend with the actual plate to either paint out some areas more easily
[02:41] or perhaps reveal a section of it for a disappearing trick. When a shot contains any CG elements like spaceships, creatures, magical effects or maybe castles, you'll be handed CG passes from a 3D lighting artist For some effects you might receive some other filmed elements or have to dig up some stock footage or elements to add a little bit of juice to your scene like some filmed footage of dust or fire A great example of this is the atomic bomb sequence on Oppenheimer where the entire thing was built up from shot footage without making use of any CGI 3D renders
[03:08] Now that everything has been gathered, many usually start with some of the more technical prep stuff, like reformatting some footage so that they're all in line, or retining and repositioning some footage if the shot calls for it, or even denoising plates, meaning removing as much grain from the footage as possible,
[03:21] so that we can easily match the CG render to it, and then add in some film grain later to the entire shot uniformly. Then you might move on to keying some elements out, like an actor against a blue screen, to quickly block things in and get a rough idea of where your shot is going.
[03:33] Things start to get a little bit more interesting here, especially if you're working on a 3D shot. 3D renders are generally broken up into passes and layers or AOVs, meaning if a shot contains two foreground characters, some background characters, a background environment, a vehicle, and some effects elements,
[03:46] they'll often each be broken out into their individual file sequences. On top of that, each of these passes will also contain additional data layers for further control, like a specular pass. It only contains the reflective information or a position pass to fix additional 2D elements onto it in 3D.
[04:01] Diving deeper down the 3D composite and rabbit hole, Cryptomatte ID passes are often rendered to isolate CG elements and create masks on the fly. Any renderer should be able to provide these, and in Newt, you'll be able to select whatever 3D objects you'd want to collect and create a mask out of.
[04:15] Going even deeper than that, pun intended, we've landed into the beautiful world of deep compositing, something that's been used very frequently in high-level animation or VFX studios, where instead of relying on mats and holdouts, you can offer compositors a D-pass where you generate holdouts in compositing based on the depth of your CG scene.
[04:30] by essentially creating a kind of point cloud representation of the 3D scene directly in Nuke. Just because you're responding to the doesn't mean a little 3D work doesn't bleed in from time to time. You might have to project map paintings or skies onto cards and spheres,
[04:43] or even onto basic 3D geometry in some cases, or project some 2D effects or screens onto cards and track into camera to integrate them seamlessly into the scene. Finally, the magic sauce and compositing are all the post-taucasin effects, adding bloom and exponential glow, diffusing bright hotspots,
[04:57] and halation where colors bleed around bright areas. Chromatic aberration, where the colors fringe and get offset near the edges of the camera lens. Lens dirt, because lenses can be like that. Noisy film grain, the animated kind, always.
[05:09] And simulating depth of field or motion blur when needed, although these days, motion blur is more often than not rendered directly in the CG render for a more accurate result. With all of this out of the way, it's time to kick out a render to be reviewed in dailies. Brace yourself for a healthy dose of feedback from supervisors, which will require another important skill,
[05:24] deciphering their cryptic notes, such as, make it realistic, looks good, keep going. And my personal favorite, my heart does not connect with your shots. Then you go back to your desk, press the make it beautiful button to get the shot approved, and rinse and repeat until eventually your supervisor and clients deem it worthy.
[05:38] It's all pretty straightforward, but speaking honestly though, there can often be late nights in the VFX studio near crunch time, where the only thing harder to track than a fast moving object is your own sleep schedule Compositors themselves can vary quite a bit in range of skill On a single team at the same senior level one artist might lean more towards strictly artistic and creative excellence where another might be more involved in the technical side of things possibly even
[05:58] developing tools with code and Python. Even solely on the creative side, you might have a compter who's more well-versed in 3D rendering, or another that really understands color science super well. The point is that the field has such an immense range of information that it's almost impossible
[06:11] for a single artist to master all of it, and that you don't need to be perfect at everything just to be a compositor. Each compositor brings something unique to the table for this visual feast. Learning the software alone isn't going to make you a compositor, at least not a good one. You'll also need to sharpen some actual creative art skills. That doesn't necessarily mean you need
[06:27] to start picking up oil painting lessons from grandma just yet, although it doesn't hurt. But what is important is a solid understanding of image composition and color theory, and generally approaching life with a sense of curiosity, attempting to break down real-world reference into individual elements. What's also vital is understanding the fundamentals of photography
[06:42] and how cameras work, what an ISO value is, how camera exposures work, what an f-stop and a focal distance is, or knowing how lens effects are layered. If all of that was diverse to you and you hope to get into compositing someday, maybe start there.
[06:54] The general structure of hierarchy and career progression for compositors looks a little something like this. You'd usually start in roto-paint, where you'd learn the fundamentals of rotoscoping and painting frames. This is a great position to start in the industry and to learn the fundamentals of compositing and the software of choice, usually Nuke.
[07:09] Then you'd likely move on to a fully-fledged compositing position, going through ranks as a junior, mid, senior, and many actually prefer to just kind of stop there and toast as a senior or a lead, either because they'd rather not sit endlessly in meetings throughout the day while the compositing chops start to dry up.
[07:23] Others would just straight up rather not deal with people, and I can't blame them. Turns out some people have egos that are difficult to manage. But if it does interest you and you have the set of soft skills required for leadership, then you'd move on to lead compositor, and then on to compositing supervisor, or maybe even head of compositing at a large enough studio.
[07:37] There are sometimes roles above even that, like head of 2D responsible for all the 2D departments at a facility level, or the effects supervisor overseeing the digital effects show side. And finally, because of the strong photography and general artistic eye of compositors,
[07:49] as well as the fact they're at the end of the pipelines, they have a solid overview of the entire process. The role caters nicely to eventually landing a role as a visual effects supervisor, the ones responsible for overseeing all of the art direction and visual effects across an entire project,
[08:02] and dealing with the clients directly. Despite sometimes looking like a tangled web of color grades and merge nodes, Nuke is without a doubt the industry standard when it comes to compositing movies. If that's your goal, this is the software to learn. After Effects has its place as well, to a small degree.
[08:14] Some smaller compositing shops still use it, and it's become somewhat of a staple within the motion graphics community and advertising industry for its tool set when it comes to animating shapes and layers. Where Nuke excels at handling CG render passes,
[08:26] and its node-based structure allows for templating so that you can reuse some of the same processes across an entire sequence, other softwares like Autodesk Flame and DaVinci Dissolve are also used, mostly on the advertising side of things, but to a much lesser extent.
[08:38] ZFX is the kind of industry that you can expect to ride out with the same set of skills and tricks you learned decades ago Software is constantly evolving and it important to keep on top of things and always stay ahead of the curve learning new tools and applications to remain efficient and to be frank employable
[08:51] The future of compositing has a lot of interesting tools on the horizon. Already we're seeing a lot of usage of AI when it comes to global paintwork, usually nothing that produces final quality results out of the box, but definitely stuff that produces first pass, work in progress results very quickly that can be refined later, otherwise
[09:06] known as garbage maps. Nuke Copycat allows you to quickly get fairly high quality maps out, allowing you to essentially keep people out of the background without any green screens or, you know, hard work. Or even some more complex paintwork like de-aging and beautifying faces.
[09:18] Runway ML also has similar tools allowing you to quickly generate garbage maps or even paint out elements in the frame in seconds. Defakes have seen some usage professionally, ILM claims to have used it fairly extensively on digital face replacements for Mark Hamill's de-aging, but for now it seems to only be
[09:32] useful as another path to be mixed in with the rest of the CG at best. Some tools, like DaVinci Resolve, offer tools that let you relight your main subject, which seems like it could be useful in some cases. I haven't really tried it to be honest, but the demos look kinda cool.
[09:44] And I guess Sora might maybe be on the horizon. For now it seems like it might be decent at generating some stock footage, which might be very helpful for some environment plates to start from, or perhaps even generating some elements to composite together, but all this remains to be seen, so.
[09:57] And as always, here are some of our favorite resources when it comes to compositing. Nukipedia is any copper secret weapon. Despite being a ridiculously slow website for some reason, it's got some of the best community source tools available for free, like Exponential Glow, Lenslayer Factories, Chromatic Aberration, and Greater LV Notes.
[10:13] Pixel Fudger, a collection of tools developed and maintained by a senior podcaster over many years working professionally, is another essential toolkit that any self-respecting compositor could be remiss not to install. Action ZFX, on the other hand, has some great resources when it comes to 2D stock elements.
[10:26] They've got film footage and renders of many effects elements with different properties and angles, such as flames, smoke, dust, debris, lightning, explosions, and bullets, both on and on. Shopdeck is an incredible resource for sourcing reference and inspiration.
[10:38] This website allows you to dig through countless, actually they did count it, 1,100,828 shots from other popular films with notable cinematic moments. And Artless.io is a great site to look up high-quality, royalty-free stocks
[10:50] that are simply used as a starting plate for a shot. Finally, if you're looking to get started along the path to advanced compositing using online lessons, check out Composite Academy or Composite Pro. These masterclasses offered by industry professionals are among the best that we've found online to date.
[11:03] And that should cover it. VFX compositing is an immensely complex, interesting, and rewarding profession, where every shot presents a new puzzle to be solved, keeping you sharp and things interesting. But you really have to be passionate and driven to keep at it. They're the unsung heroes of cinema, making the impossible look effortless,
[11:17] and unfortunately, getting about the same recognition as the caterers and dog walkers in return. So if a late-night, caffeine-fueled, overtime video bashing session sounds fun to you, or if you found the info in this video at all useful, be sure to subscribe and stay notified.
[11:29] And we've got a Discord server up now, so join us with the link in the description, or you can feel free to poke us with any remaining burning questions you might still have or you know just say hi