Digital FX Bottleneck

I knew that the digital fx in this film would be a challenge, but I didn't know it would bring my project to its knees in the Premiere timeline.

I got the bulk of the edit done without any fx inserted. As I built the story up, I added in the green screen shots as I needed them and collected them.

But, as I started to go through each scene that had hologram fx, and dynamic link those to the After Effects projects, things got a little out of hand.

I ended up with over 80 composites to built each image of a hologram, which consisted of green screen shots, 3 separate RGB channels, and a half dozen fx.

This does not take into account, the crash scene for Commander Brax; any of the planetary skybox shots; additional rotoscoping; and the digital heads up displays, screens, and space shots at the beginning of the film.

After all is said and done, I believe I will have well over 100 individual digital fx shots, the majority of which are just hologram reversals with Brax. For everything I have created, I've used After Effects and Blender to create; composite and render those shots. After Effects is powerful, but I would much rather be using Nuke for the composites, and After Effects to just make the elements. Blender is amazing for a free / open source 3D modeling and animating software. It can also be used for compositing, which is a useful tool.

What a fun project and I'm approaching the end; still, this has been a huge undertaking for one person.