NickMarshall

Exactly, And the problem with fire is that it emits light, so even if the CG fire itself looks great, if you havent got totally convincing fire light on set or it doesnt quite match the CG fire, it still wont look right. That and the fact that the fire and smoke will need to interact with the movements of the actor all work to make that a really tough effect to pull off. You could probably spend as much time and money just doing good fire lighting on set as you would finding a way to do a practical effect safely, and thats before you have to worry about getting totally photoreal CG fire ;) Hope it help, would be great to see your results whichever method you take. N

I honestly think you would be much better off finding a practical solution. CG fire is a really tough one to get right, and bad CG will ruin the shot more than a slightly underwhelming practical effect IMO. What you could do to help a little is to shoot some fire plates to extract, keep the shots quite tight and have some of the practical fire creeping into the frame to make the effect look a bit more dramatic? I really think your time would be better spent finding a good way to do this practically - it will look real (because it is) and your talents reactions will be better. Of course, this is just my opinion though :)

Yeah, it depends how seriously you want to learn and how familiar you are with the basic principles going in. If you treat learning it as a full time job for 3 months, you can learn enough to do most things to a reasonable level. If you just put an hour or two in per week, it could take years to produce decent work. I've been using Maya on and off for 5 years, but havent committed a proper decent chunk of time to learning it so i feel like I am still just a beginner.

This should be a relatively easy one to pull off i think. The best bet would be your second option, to cover the lens with green, but put some red dots on the green (either one or four depending on the room over the lens and what the camera can pick up, but 4 is better if poss for a 4 point track). This way you can track the lens to replace what is on it quite easily. You will help yourself out a great deal if you can shoot a couple of reference passes of what it actually looks like when you film a reflection in your lens. I suspect that you will need to play around a bit to get both the correct movement of the reflection over the lens, and the glass effect reacting to the light. Also, depending on the light, you may see down into the lens barrel a little, so be prepared to recreate that look if its needed. Bear in mind, i dont expect you will need to key the green, its just to give you a high contrast area so you can see what you need to replace. Good luck!

Basically, the camera move will affect how easy or difficult this will be. Also, whether there are any moving objects that cross over the object that you wish to remove. Basically, what you have to do is recreate whatever is behind the object that you want to remove. The easiest way to do that is if you have really good photography of the location without the object in the scene that you wish to remove. You can then use this to make a patch that covers the object to be removed, grade it to match, match the camera movement so that it sticks, and match the grain stock so that it doesnt look stuck on. If you have an object that crosses over this patch, you may need to extract it so that it can be brough back on top. The usual method would be rotoscoping, but sometimes you can get a chromakey or lumakey, it depends on the situation. If you have a camera move that would require parallax, it becomes much harder, but can still be done, i can explain further if anyone is remotely interested past this stage ;) Of course, all of this depends on your ability to use some higher end compositing softwares, which can be hugely time consuming in itself to learn. I did this work full time for a couple of years, and it happens all the time in films, especially higher budget films that can afford all the vfx work. I've had shots where 2/3rds of the frame has had to be replaced in this manner, and it can get INCREDIBLY complex, but the basics aren't too painful. Hope it helps... Nick