Compositing advice ...

[frostywd]

Please excuse my newbness here but I want to do a personal project and I want to get the right equiptment.

I want to film a short film - less then 3 minutes - as a spoof. My idea is to have to people driving down the highway, the passenger shooting video of the driver. While panning the camera you see a large logo ( of my company ) floating over our corporate office like a space ship. Again, it's a silly spoof. The camera will be shaking as the 'actors' freak out but the logo would remain fixed over a specific point - camera tracking?

My question is will LW and something like Shake do this? I just purchased a Canon HV10 High-Definition Camcorder which shoots in 1080i.

I'm using this as a learning experience but I want to make shure that I have all the tools and by the way ... if someone could give me a clue how to do this I would be forever in their debt.

Thanks!

[Lightwolf]

For the matchmove of the camera I can heartily recommend SynthEyes (http://www.ssontech.com). MAybe a bit hefty for a single shot... but well worth it. And you'll be using it over and over again.

Cheers,
Mike

[Silkrooster]

I haven't had the chance to do much compositing in lightwave, but here are my thoughts.
Your first step getting a HD video camera was a very smart step for what you want to do. Using HD video allows you room to move your image around and crop.
So since you can add video as a background in your scene just move your video around to make the image look like it is shaking(use jolt plug in or add noise in the graph editor), while your logo and camera are still. The camera settings (something smaller than 1080i maybe 720i or sd) is what will crop your video, doing this will avoid the viewer from seeing the edges of the video.
I am sure others with more experience will also give ideas.
Silk