Good afternoon everyone. I hope the latest bullshittery was to your liking - https://youtu.be/HfEayDlb6cE
Now for a proper editing retrospective. That was a very challenging video. Good lord.
The most obvious problem was the record breaking heatwave in the UK at the tail end of June. It overwhelmed my portable air conditioner and made concentrating on anything - let alone a difficult keyframing job - almost impossible. My office was like a small furnace.
But the biggest challenges of this video were wrapped around three issues - low resolutions, low bitrates, and low frame rates.
The first issue was self-caused. For not all of my footage (particularly older footage pre-2020) was filmed in 1080p. Owing to how rapidly streams of that size consume hard drive space.
720p was used for quite a lot of DayZ as it was deemed sufficient at the time.
I decided to upscale a lot of the footage by inserting them into a "precomp" and then increasing the scale size by 50% to render at 1080p.
But also the frame rates for the DayZ Standalone have been (and often still are) pretty inconsistent. With the game being so famous for chugging, that the zombies were flat-out disabled for some years during development.
This, combined with all the foliage dipping the bitrate, resulted in a bullshittery keyframing job that was overwhelmingly manual. Or where the automated tracking required constant corrections.
Some projects let me simply put down a handful of positional keyframes and trust After Effects to interpolate the correct motion.
But NOT DayZ.
The tracking point required a crazy amount of human correction to properly interpret the often blobby and often blurry figures. Particularly to point out what I often need - the head.
And there are two principle forms of auto-tracking I use. Point and Planar.
Point tracking, which goes by colour, luminance or saturation of a batch of pixels, looks like this:
And planar tracking, which tries to imagine a flat surface and move it around accordingly:
BOTH had wildly inconsistent results. And struggled with this footage due to its often poor quality. Or the natural challenges that come from video games.
For example, check out the shadows on the dashboard of this car. Our human brains struggle not with this. But both point and planar tracking really did. Requiring constant handholding to avoid escalating erroneous results.
Another thing that made this project difficult was a sort of easy-ease, or ease-in ease-out effect that exists within the DayZ standalone.
This is where any zoom in effect, with a weapon or eyes, does not do so uniformly. But experiences a smooth gradient towards the end where the motion smooths out.
Well my whole gimmick is trying to make the text look like it's part of the game. Moving with the characters, etc. It turns out that easing is staggeringly difficult to reproduce convincingly.
The point/planar tracking can sometimes do it. But the results were extremely inconsistent.
As a result, I often had to manually move frame by frame on the last part of a zoom, guessing the final zoom value with extremely specific values (101.3%, 101.6% 102.1%, etc). Repeating until I got it right.
Tell you one thing though, I did have some great success with one element of my editing. And that was the creation of a small one-man DayZ server for the sake of recording "B-Roll", mostly audio.
For example, two scenes might have wildly different background ambience - one with utter silence. And the other with 6 of the guys in teamspeak, loudly bantering about something unrelated.
I would record some blowing wind or something to bridge the gap between those scenes and make it much easier on the ears.
The glock firing scene is another example of added in post, since the gunshot was being very loudly talked over in the original shot. I simply shimmied the audio about 10 seconds later to when Cake was speaking (her voice is softer). And recorded a glock gunshot in dayz.
The two gunshots into the toilet were the same. Mainly because the original sound was supressed and I needed to make it clear that I just fired this gun. Though that audio was from an actual livestream.
I did get very cheeky in a couple of places though. Firstly, the original start of the bullshittery was far too abrupt. As I was mostly spinning on the spot, lighting flares and demonstrating the game mechanics.
I was worried it would turn first time viewers off.
So, I used the admin tools to go to the same location, match the weather, match the saturation, match the gear, the bullet count. Then do a smoother fade in, to give the viewer time to adjust. The real footage snaps in around 10 seconds in and the bullshittery continues as normal.
The eagle-eyed viewer might notice that the handgun on the second slot switches round. It has a slightly transparent background, so I figured it best to just leave it alone. Nobody is gonna notice anyway shhhhh....
Another part where I've been naughty is...well, technically...maybe...possibly...I might have pulled an itsy-bittsy little "kebab shop owner" sin and served something listed as pork, but it wasn't actually pork.
I might have secretly served up some non-DayZ clips in disguise.
For the ZF clan have played lot of DayZ. Both when it was an Arma 2 mod and even Arma 3. With lots of variants. For example, Overwatch, Origins, Overpoch and Epoch. The Standalone used to be just one example of many. Competing for the audience share, before the rise of battle royale.
Well 2-3 of these clips might have originally come from those other mods. Recorded whilst the DayZ standalone was still considered unplayable. Behold! The original visuals:
I've pulled a sneaky and recorded 10 seconds of footage of the DayZ standalone, then used the original audio. Mostly because I'd like to include the joke but didn't want to have to explain why graphics suddenly downgrade to Arma 3.
But that's okay, because you didn't see anything. Did you, dear Patron. No no....shhhhh. It's all the DayZ Standalone now. Yes yes.
As you can no doubt tell, I liked to use the 3D layer tool quite often to make it look like the text was rotating within the scene. This is a fairly simple these days. Where the text is placed in its own composition, so that any rotation properties applied are done collectively on the whole lot.
It's still parented with a Null Object which tracks the positional data. And that remains 2D of course. Simplifying the animation considerably.
In the scene below I had a bit of fun:
I created a composition that contains the text "zombie". It was then parented to a 2D Null Object that follows the head.
Then when the gunshot triggers, it becomes two duplicate 3D text compositions with the same positional data. Both sharing a "mask" - a jagged cut out shape in the centre.
The first is a "Subtract" mask, removing the jagged shape and looking like a blown out hole.
The second is an "Add" mask, showing only what was within the hole. And then activating a Pixel Polly effect, which makes it shatter into polygons and fly backwards.
A simple trick that makes it look like the text was struck by the buckshot.
Likewise here:
A 2D null object to track the guys head.
A 3D text composition which orientates backwards the way he falls.
But the composition contains a blood spatter effect as part of a previous purchased effects library.
In some scenes I found everything was rather dark. So a simple "adjustment layer" can be applied in After Effects, which transfers all effects to everything below. Meaning all the footage can be quickly brightened by just adding a Brightness effect to the adjustment layer.
But sometimes I do the opposite. Restricting the adjustment layer so it only affects the weapon slots UI at the bottom. So it's dark the moment there's white text down there to read. Making it easier on the eyeline.
The thunderstorm here was a IMPACT Bold font text layer, with a pre-packaged "Rain" simulated effect set to match the in game conditions (droplet speed, etc). Then a couple of brightness keyframes for the lightning flashes in time with the audio.
The Halo text effect on the toilet took the form of a series of hidden "shape layers" drawn with a pen tool. The text can then be made to snap and follow the line.
What was complicated here wasn't the drawing of the shapes, but the multiple masks needed in the foreground to make the illusion.
Observe behind the curtain at this headache:
BewBewDingo was kind enough to modify that original Antistasi picture of Cyanide's superhot girlfriend. Giving me an animated version with moving eyes, etc.
That comp proved to be MUCH more challenging than I had assumed. Taking up all of an entire weekend.
I had made an incorrect assumption and technical mistake that cost me an inordinate amount of time.
I had assumed that blinking eyes, moving eyeballs, were going to be a good thing. In the end I toned it down and it was a bit distracting.
It turns out that if you parent eyeball movement to a slider/null on a different layer, it doesn't dynamically respect the timestamp of the composition it's actually in. Meaning that that I spent hours going "why are the eyes moving when they shouldn't".
Eventually I kept the animation much simpler than I had original envisioned. Hopefully it still works.
Lastly, Ilse was kind enough to modify a famous meme picture from DayZ. To be more inline with Quebec's story. For the image is originally a Lee Enfield rifle from the Arma 2 DayZ Mod:
So that's how the project went. An exceedingly difficult one. Thank you for your patience with me as always. About 6.5 weeks instead of the originally planned 5.5.
There's still plenty of footage for more parts. Likely another 1-2 for base DayZ. Then an unknown number for DayZ Namalsk. Let me know if you fancy more.
Right now, I plan to get the public version finished. Then take a short break to relax.
Polls to follow soon on the next project :)
Thank you all.