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SynthEyes on National Treasure: Book of Secrets

This is a breakdown from Michael Lori of Asylum, which did this work. 

Warning: the breakdown contains spoilers!

"The very opening shot, transitions from Bruckheimer's tree logo to civil war soldiers walking down a road.  Actually 2 shots (solved indirectly), the river and whole left half is all cg, most of the right side is matte paintings. All of the left side cg is set extension/ replacement that's locked to the original plates and the matte paintings were all placed in the Flame via the SE-generated cameras.  Our compositors request 3d tracks for everything, now that they know we can give them great results quickly.

The Easter Egg hunt at the White House wasn't actually shot on the White House lawn. Just a few shots there.

The Mount Rushmore lake stuff - the small rock opening is cg enhanced and the whole cave entrance is a huge cg extension.  None of the cave entrance is practical.  20-ish shots there.

The Giants' Causeway (no idea if that name is referenced in the movie or not) - John Voight & Helen Mirren swing across a chasm.  Very little practical set, mostly bluescreen.  45 shots.

The Balance Chamber - just about every shot has a set extension (above or below), and the platform was object-tracked for most of the shots.  The idol was never partly gold, so that was either tracked or hand-animated when necessary.  125 shots here.

The City of Gold - this was the heavy lifting on the show.  The director, once he saw what was shot, decided that he didn't like the look of the buildings, they weren't gold enough.  Every shot in this sequence was tracked so the buildings could have a different look.  Every bit of gold in the entire sequence is enhanced with cg.  Lots of tricky shots with very little parallax (but not quite nodal) where we see only co-planar points that are obscured and out of focus, wide shots with multiple buildings that somehow had asymmetrical lens distortion, "survey" data that didn't quite match the real set, you name the problem, we ran into it on this one.  105-ish shots."