Week One: Working with Keyers
Bluescreen and greenscreen compositing are the bread and butter of digital compositing. Explore Shake’s different keyer technologies by working with Keylight, Primatte, and the ChromaKeyer on a variety of problems to compare results. Learn their strengths and weakness and when to use which. Understand the despill operation and its inherent artifacts.

Week Two: Helping the Keyer
The sales brochure aside, it is rare that you can just plug a bluescreen into the keyer and dial in a beautiful composite. Most of the time you must help the keyer by using a number of strategies that include pre-processing the bluescreen and devising clever divide and conquer strategies. Learn the secrets to out-smarting the keyer to get a better composite.

Week Three: Compositing CGI
A great deal of the work in digital compositing is to composite CGI, or 3D animation. The modern digital compositor must know how to work with multi-pass CGI renders as well as multi-plane compositing. Color correcting the CGI elements must be done using the unpremultiplied version even though the CGI is delivered premultiplied.

Week Four: Photorealistic Color Correction
Whether compositing CGI or bluescreen elements, a key step in a professional digital composite is to color correct the various layers so that they all appear to have been filmed together. Develop a methodical step-by-step procedure to guarantee photorealism in your composites plus the “constant green” method of color adjustment that leaves brightness undisturbed.

Week Five: Convincing Composites
Color correcting the layers of a composite is merely the first step towards achieving a convincing composite. All of the other layer attributes must also be convincingly matched which include lens effects, grain and noise matching, depth of field, shadows, edge blending, and light wrap effects.

Week Six: Rotoscoping
Rotoscoping is a core skill in digital compositing and indeed may be the first job a new compositor gets. Learn about spline-based rotoscoping, how to choose the appropriate keyframe strategy, articulated rotos, creating motion blur, and how to do a quality inspection of your finished roto to find your mistakes before the boss does.

Week Seven: Massive Matte Methods
In every composite you will need to isolate one or more objects with a matte for special treatment – color correction, a blur, you name it. Learn multiple methods of creating a matte designed to fit any situation – lumakey, chromakey, the difference matte, the color difference matte, garbage mattes, and how to “roll your own”. Being able to quickly create a clever matte can save you hours of rotoscoping.

Week Eight: Working with Video
Most digital compositors will be working with video, which brings its own long list of issues to the table. Learn how to de-interlace video (and when you don’t have to!), how to cope with non-square pixels, when and how to perform a 3:2 pullup and how to put it back with a 3:2 pulldown. Learn tips, tricks, and techniques for coping with the 4:2:2 color sampling of video.

Level of Ability
You do not need to be an experience compositor, but you will need to know how to operate Shake 4.1. Be sure you have read the manual and run the tutorials included with Shake so you can focus on the production knowledge and techniques that this course will give you rather than struggling for the right button to turn on the viewer. This course is also ideal for experienced Adobe After Effects compositors that have moved up to Shake and wish to understand the different workflow of a node-based compositor like Shake as opposed to the layer-based compositing workflow of AE.

Software/hardware Requirements
This course will be using Shake 4.1 that can be run on either a Mac or a Linux machine. Apple’s recent price reduction to US$499 makes Shake accessible to almost anybody that wishes to own a top-of-the-line feature film quality digital compositing program. It is still possible to get a lot out of this course using Shake 3.5, but it will be missing some features used in the classes and is not recommended.

Students can also download a 30-day trial version of Shake 4 prior to purchase.

Other requirements

A broadband connection to the internet will be required to download the class videos as well as the substantial image files for the exercises. Some of the sample scenes are hardware heavy, so its recommended to have a minimum of 1 GB of RAM and a fast processor.

Students need to be familiar with web navigation and browsing, as well as email.

Students need to be familiar with using a bulletin board system (such as CGTalk.com) as well as how to upload attachments to postings for review.