Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)
Hi all,
My solution to this problem seems very drawn-out and i'm confident there's a more efficient way of doing things!
Essentially I have an hours worth of footage of a man talking face on close to the camera (it's for a web project). Rather than
been shot against a blue screen, he is standing in front of a mid-grey backdrop for the entire duration which clashes badly with the
man himself. My job is to remove this background so the man is on top of white.
Firstly, I tried various keying effects I have in Premiere Pro and After Effects 6 (the two software packages I use). I
experimented around and did some research - they worked brilliantly, but because the mans face and clothes had so similar tones to
the greu background, no matter how hard I tried and tweaked, all the keying effects would start removing out bits of the man when I
pushed the key to the desired levels. It worked on the whole of the image, whereas I wanted a magic-wand style affair which would
only pick up the grey background around the edge.
My solution was a really drawn out one - I exported a two minute test clip from the timeline as a PNG sequence. I then used an
action in Photoshop to open each frame, magic wand the top left corner of the image (set to contiguous, so it kept it to a local
selection), fill it in white, and save it. Using Virtualdub, I then re-constructed an AVI file from the Photoshop output.
It looked fantastic- but it just seems ridiculous. This is the only way I could fill the grey background white without interfering
with the man himself. Contiguous is the key thing here - i'd love some kind of effect in AE or Premiere which worked in this way
I'm thinking the solution probably surrounds some kinds of motion-tracking, but I'm not really sure how to do that because i'm quite
new to all this, and would really appreciate some advice!
Many, many thanks!
Chris
Hi all,
My solution to this problem seems very drawn-out and i'm confident there's a more efficient way of doing things!
Essentially I have an hours worth of footage of a man talking face on close to the camera (it's for a web project). Rather than
been shot against a blue screen, he is standing in front of a mid-grey backdrop for the entire duration which clashes badly with the
man himself. My job is to remove this background so the man is on top of white.
Firstly, I tried various keying effects I have in Premiere Pro and After Effects 6 (the two software packages I use). I
experimented around and did some research - they worked brilliantly, but because the mans face and clothes had so similar tones to
the greu background, no matter how hard I tried and tweaked, all the keying effects would start removing out bits of the man when I
pushed the key to the desired levels. It worked on the whole of the image, whereas I wanted a magic-wand style affair which would
only pick up the grey background around the edge.
My solution was a really drawn out one - I exported a two minute test clip from the timeline as a PNG sequence. I then used an
action in Photoshop to open each frame, magic wand the top left corner of the image (set to contiguous, so it kept it to a local
selection), fill it in white, and save it. Using Virtualdub, I then re-constructed an AVI file from the Photoshop output.
It looked fantastic- but it just seems ridiculous. This is the only way I could fill the grey background white without interfering
with the man himself. Contiguous is the key thing here - i'd love some kind of effect in AE or Premiere which worked in this way
I'm thinking the solution probably surrounds some kinds of motion-tracking, but I'm not really sure how to do that because i'm quite
new to all this, and would really appreciate some advice!
Many, many thanks!
Chris
If you can look at the seperate
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