I am reminded of the story about the grain of rice on the chess board being doubled every time and at the end the emperor didn’t have enough rice in his kingdom

Reshoot the shot using 2 mirrors at 90 to each other with the candle in the middle

then use the luma mask and stack the nests

edit

Particleillusion mighty help Bob

Render out the sequence as png sequence and set it in particle illusion you have an unlimited no of particle emitter points so you will get your million in a few seconds

The render will take a while


Rory

to make things simpler: just make a small image sequence of the candle in a loop & make it physically small: 100x100 pixels or something similar.

Only on the front do you need real candles. The rest could be hand painted if you wanted. It wouldn't surprise me if the easiest & fastest way is to go buy a couple dozen candles, set them up, light them, video tape it, then you've got a front row set. That will costs maybe $20-50. @ 1920x1080, 1 million candles would be 2 pixels in size each, so I'm sure you actually want a lot less. :D

just a thought, render a bunch, use that render as a track, make a duplicate render with that and another, and keep going until you have what you need by reducing the amount of tracks and increasing the size of the rendered sections.

I would also consider doing 10 or 20 first, no 3D transforms, and creating a new file from that. Now use that new file 10 or 20 times with slight time offsets again. Use the 3D transforms on the final set. If you do 15 three times you'll have 3375. Not many people will be able to distinguish a difference between 3375 and a million. People's brains crap out on numbers bigger than a few hundred.

I would make a single row evenly spaced. Make sure to fill the screen. Render it.

Take a gradient fill and add a shadow to a copy of the rendered row so the
light falls off quickly. Render it.

Then make multiple tracks of the second rendering. Place the original row
in the front.

Seen a picture of a real event, 26,000 candles Amnesty International, 04 June 2008, Someone surely has the video

Thanks guys, some good ideas there.
Precompositing sections should be the answer, the way I'm doing it at the moment is forcing Vegas to do an insane number of calculations.
I like the two mirrors idea.

Bob.

I took this as a bit of a challenge. Anyways, I think a million candles is way to many. This is 3162 candles - still too many unless I stretch back further in space or something.

http://www.xander-online.com/farss/farss_candles.png

I used the Motion Design Element from Digital Juices' Editor's Toolkit Pro 44: Candle Light. In After Effects, I used this element as a particle in Trapcode Form and displaced it in x and z space using fractal noise. I also randomly offset each candle in time so they don't move in unison.

Let me know if you want me to whip something up for you.

That looks pretty impressive!

As an aside I found a rather obscure AE tutorial that I've now lost the link to. Anyways the lady shows how to duplicate a single object any number of times using a script. The neat trick is getting the 2D object to look 3D. She uses an expression to keep the object pointed at the camera. Only works for certain objects e.g. flowers. Should work OK for a candle.

Things is realised I could make this concept the hero shot of the whole piece but I'd need a camera move to an overhead shot. My self imposed challenge will be to shoot one or several real candles using a camera on our jib for the real move and then see if I can composite many of these together. Probably should wait until our new Panther head arrive for our jib so I can undersling the camera and have it move around its optical centre. Nice to get to play with expensive toys :)

If the shot works out I'll put it into the public domain. I'm using a lot of public domain footage in this project so it seems very fair to repay the community.

Bob.

Could you post up some sketches of what you're looking for? I might go out & get a bunch of candles to do this. Not like we won't use them anyway! :D

Shouldn't use Vegas for this. Particles in a good compositor are the answer. Will be much quicker. You get one image sequence ( or clip ) of a candle. Use that as a particle and then just set to as many as needed. All that's left after that is some randomizing so they start looping at different frames and it will look like different candles flickering/burning at different rates.

Bob, I found a great little AE project at the bottom of this thread that uses a real image of a flame and the puppet tool in AE to animate it. I downloaded it and it looks rather good. I added a few of these comps and off-set them from each other so the flickers looked more random. You should be able to create a convincing look with this and the camera in AE.

~jr

Thanks JR!

As I soon discovered the trickiest part is not building the comp of all the candles as such, it's cleanly extracting just the candle and the flame from the video I shot. The glow around the flame is quite a problemo using a luminance mask in either Vegas or AE.

What I found happening was as I stacked many tracks / layers all the fliggin noise adds up. Trying to get the mask really clean leaves me with hard edges on the glow and that looks just as horrid. Rather than using a key I think I'll have to hand mask the flame. I take my hat off to those who do this kind of work for the silver screen!

Bob.

any reason you can't do the "glow" as a separate layer? IE a light blur, etc?