Can panning across a plate be made look decent? Rookie Q:

Are there any secrets to making footage look natural when I take a plate shot, drop in in my Resolve timeline and pan across it—I presume with Dynamic Zoom. The rest of the footage is at the normal 23.9 frame rate.

The problem is that I shoot in the Midwest where the outdoor light this time of year is very flat, very grey, very challenging. I need to include an establishing shot of the front of an office building but the lead-colored skies in the footage I shot make it look like a Soviet prison. (I have a picture of the building earlier in the year when it looks beautiful.)

Thanks
RS

depends upon how much time and effort you are able to devote to the shot..

one answer is to roto the shot into depth layers, and move a virtual camera in a 3d enviroment with depth of feild, motion blur, lens distortion and a tiny bit of random camera bumps and rotation.. that can look very real

a pan across a still will look like a pan across a still in any software

From purely technical standpoint, you have to introduce the specific "warping" that perspective camera introduces. I'm not talking about lens distortion, which is additional distortion introduced by lenses. I'm talking about perspective projection effect itself which is present also in pinhole camera. Missing this is the biggest giveaway that you are simply moving across a flat image, not nodal panning in scene. The effect is less pronounced in long lenses, but still present.

Easiest way to accomplish this is to map the footage to a sphere and animate a virtual camera rotating inside. For mapping, the most accurate solution is projecting the image from camera with correct fov (camera projection is the keyword here). Lens distortion should first be removed from footage ofcourse and reintroduced into animated camera footage.

In Resolve you can't do it properly afaik. You need a comp application with 3D capabilities or a 3D app. Fusion, Nuke etc will do the job.

Thank you for your quick answers. On the positive side, now I have a good reason to start learning Fusion.