When we released our 2012 SCS National Championships video last week it sparked a storm of commentary and feedback, both positive and negative. We encourage and appreciate both—your perspective and comments never fall on deaf ears, and the constructive criticism we receive helps us to continue our progression at LT11.
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LT11 wanted to try something new and different at the 2012 SCS National Championships. Our goal this year for our comp coverage was to raise the bar, construct narrative and tell a story–something that’s been missing from the climbing comp media landscape. We decided to try out a Virtual Studio of sorts to give our sports MC, Big Pete Ward a nice relavant backdrop to interview athletes, set the stage and tell the story. This was our first attempt at something like this. We were very pleased with the way it worked out. We learned a lot by going for it and I’m psyched for the next event. The Virtual Studio will be even better! Here is a quick breakdown of how we put that together.

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Z-depth compositing is a technique I’ve always wanted to know more about. Until recently, I thought it was a lot more complicated than it actually is. Turns out it is quite simple and powerful utilizing the RPF file format when rendering out in Cinema 4D. RPF is a format that can use 3D metadata baked into the image sequence. After Effects has built in tools/plugins that can get at that data and do some powerful stuff. In this tutorial I show you one practical application in which I’ve used z-depth compositing on a recent small project. I show you how to do some very basic modeling and animation in Cinema 4D using a cloner object with some effectors. I show you how to set up that render for After Effects using the RPF format and how to use the format in After Effects for compositing. As a bonus, I talk a little about how we created the hologram elements themselves using stop motion and a green screen.
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