Stitching Together Shots To Look Like One Take?

Hey blackmagic community,

Need a little help, please.

I'm currently shooting something with a long tracking shot. I need to logistically split it up into two different passes. I have a little overlap in between the passes so that way I can hopefully stitch together the two shots to make it look like one. How can I do that?

Thanks in advance!

Well, if you can reproduce everything in the shot 100%, you’ll just need to find the right frames to cut.
If not, try Smooth Cut and keep your fingers crossed.

It depends on the scene and how close is the move. Easiest is to do a cut from closest frame as Uli suggested. You can also do a transformed takeover to align them better: move-rotate one or both shots to minimize the difference at takeover moment. If difference is bigger, some kind of optical flow based takeover is next easiest way (this is what smoothcut does in essence). If thos doesn’t work either, usually next step is to do a 3d track, and produce virtual cam for takeover part, so that shot starts from part 1 cam, then diverges to virtual cam and in the end joins path with part 2 camera. Do camera projections onto simple geo and blend the projected textures during takeover.

If you have arbitrarily moving objects/subjects in scene it can be hard. People for example. You should separately treat each element and comp back in.

Or do what Hitchcock did when a reel of film was no longer than 10 minutes, I think it was in “Rope”: Find a foreground object to cover the scene for a moment. The creative solution!

As Uli said, you could comp in a fast moving foreground object (bird, hand, tree) that hides the take switch.

Thanks for all the input! Really helpful.

On a different note...

I'm looking into square filters. Why is the Tiffen Water White Polarizer IRND $92 and their full spectrum IRND is $508. Do I need a polarizer or just go with a really great IRND?

Thanks, y'all!