Motion Keying

[Meierhans]

If you want to work with layers, its very important if you can cut
the main parts away from background, so show doesn`t gets to confusing.

I got some nice surfer clips, surfer in black, wave in blue. When i first saw it, i thought to myself (what a wonderfull world ;) ) this should be easy to key. (I want the surfer alone to make him burn :jump2: )

So i tried to key it with Premiere.

But then i realized the wave is also nearly black at some lower parts, and the surfer is not as black as he looks like.

How would you do this?
What kind of keying do you use. Is there any free motion keyer?

If you want i can upload the clips, and we could make a keying contest

:p

[MoRpH]

Hmmm interesing problem, not sure how to handle it though short of actually cutting them out frame by frame.... you might try using and then tweeking the replace colur filter in premiere???

[wellREDman]

if you want some surfer stuff that keys nicely, theres a movie called big wednesday that is a peach, loadsa really nice surfing , but the weather is v. overcast and grey so u can key out the surfers really well

[Meierhans]

Thank you for your tip, i will take a look at this film. Is it normal cinema film, or how can i get it?

To keying:

My question was ment a little more general. I`m a little surprised so that many people red it and there are just 2 answers.

So in general my question is:

Does anybody knows a method to key moving object out of a clip witch changing/complex background?
(not by hand..... very uncool for 400 frames)

I know there where a plugin called "motion key" for aftereffects.

With some help, it can find the right edges and cut away the rest.
But they don`t sell it anymore (as far as i know) and older versions don`t work with newer aftereffects. Bad solution.

Generally divx already DOES someting like motion keying, it devides between foreground (actors) and background.

Bu i don`t know how I could use that for keying.

Is there nobody with the same problem?

Or is this just to easy or to strange?





;)

[MoRpH]

Hmmm OK looking @ this in detail.....

If the background is complex then to lock on the object needs to be simple (nice flatish) colour.

Otherwise, with the VJ software today (and hardware for that matter) with is mainly based on still the liner idea for application of FX(what your talking about) which means that it only looks @ one frame @ a time to apply FX (not including vide delay FX :) ) the dont' really look @ the frames around it except to actually decompress the frame (inter-rame compression).

So in essance I guess it would have to be like self adjusting magnetic lasso in photoshop but with video.......

[spark]

I am very interested in this area too. My particular fetish is the effect of augmented reality, like fighter jet heads-up-displays, and that requires tracking graphic elements to objects in the video stream. I haven't yet seen a way to do this at a vj-budget level, and would kill for an app to do so. The nearest I've seen is Combustion, which is a cut down version of the hollywood standard post app *inferno or *flame or whatever, priced as an alternative to after effects. But I'll be buggered if I'm going there for such a narrow mission... if I bite the bullet and enter the video programming world of say Nato then this is the kind of app I'd be looking to build, using a prewritten tracking module (they exist) dialled into nodes in my graphics. #dreams dreams dreams# reality anyone?

[HuoLong]

it should be possible to make color/motion tracking with gemPlus... (http://umlaeute.mur.at/gem/)

but i haven't tried it yet... (but i let you know when i do)

-huolong

[hamageddon]

those eyeweb soft, reviewed by elbows over @vjcentral got motion tracking styles, too....

and once again a thread lost it's focus :)

[MoRpH]

Hahahaha hama, but thats par for the course mate :p

I think he's talking about keying areas (and not in realtime) of a clip to a certain colour for use live later. Rather than generaling data from motion tracking in live video for use as controllers

[vjpixylight]

In Final Cut Pro there is an option to key different colors, and if you do stuff post, you could do motion color keying layers;it's still a littlebit of work..
seems to me the best way to key out stuff for me is to take the vids to Flash... once they are a swf file you can use director or progs like jilt's to overlay the files and they keep the lines very nice...from director you can output the to AVI or QT.. I know there are also some good vectoring-flash convertion prog out there as well.

[MoRpH]

Yeah never though of going through flash but really if your not able to cut the shapes out with a replace colour (similarity tweeked) in premiere (or what ever it called in FCP) then the flash will prolly be quite tricky aswell.... still Meierhans for vid 2 flash progs check that thread out over in software I think its in :)

[HuoLong]

does that "eyesweb" soft have videoOut ? [avi record]

could someone send/post "MSVC60D.DLL" file !!!

-huolong

[MoRpH]

hmmm thats the Visual C++6 DLL huh... hmmm interesting to know what it was programmed in. you sure you don't mean msvcp60.dll ??? cause I can't find the exact one your after and even when I fed it into google it corrected it saying it was a misspelling of the one I mentioned :)

try here http://dll.yaroslavl.ru/

[HuoLong]

sorry, was a typo. yep it's "MSVCP60D.DLL"

answer from that site : "Nothing found, your request was send to administrator, try search again in some next days" :)

i have MSVCP60.DLL, but whats that file with "d" and why didnt they include it ?!?!?!?

and even that reg. hack for win2k wont work @ news://infomus.dist.unige.it/eyesweb.install

well, the soft workx great, but when your not able to save.... :sad:

-huolong

[eXhale]

I'm pretty sure this 'D' stands for 'debug'. Looks like eyesweb developers compiled the software in debug mode and forgot to include the DLL in the installation app. I made the same mistake a few years ago :)

[infopocalypse]

You can actually do motion keying really easily by combining luma keys over a background. My most recent example is using luma keys + a girl dancing naked in front of a black background to make her have perfectly white skin, and then using this to do realtime lumafades.

Of course that was a loop that was preplanned, under relatively controlled conditions... not to mention a helluva lotta fun to film.

[Meierhans]

As long as your mental background isn`t to black, i think its no problem to film naked dancing girls ;) :p :p


OK, serious: I have no problem keying out blueboxed stuff / in front of black wall filmed clips.
I didn?t learn aftereffects/ premiere closer, but this is really easy to do.

All began when I found a aftereffects plugin called "Motion key":

http://www.repaire.net/navig/mont_plug/plug_imag/motion_key.jpg

It should enable you to cut away nearly any moving object out of a clip. Imagine Terminator running around in your show next to John Lennon :p
Just an example.

Unfortunatly i can`t find the developers company any more. They seem to quit their work.
I won?t buy a half baken product without any support, also 199$ is to much for me... and sorry i got to say this here.... but i also couldn`t find a s/n.
(I know its not allowed to ask for it in here.... I hope you see this is a special case. )

So does anybody knows another solution or how to get the old "motion key" working????

Would be so cute if i could have burning surfers


:jump2:

[LEVLHED]

well, you could always take a digital8 and a flame-thrower out to Hawaii.......

[Meierhans]

:yep:

[spark]

no need for the flame throwers - take a detour and surf those sulphurous pools of hell's damnation... I'll see ya there!

Toby

[Meierhans]

and there is nobody really interested in the material????

[BeeF]

hi Meierhans
i think i can help u
check ur mail in the next days
BeeF

[Meierhans]

:jump: :jump2:

[niceguydave]

Meierhans, your surfer should come out nicely with a few passes over the material with standard keys. I've seen combustion and played with the AE motion tracker a bit, and it's a tricky devil. Takes long hours to get a useful key, even with regular polygonal shapes, but it's definitely possible with standard effects.

Take your clip and whack up the contrast way too far to spread the luma distance between your man and the waves. Now luma key him away from the light background so you have him in silhouette. Using this new version as a travelling matte layer you can key out the waves from the original clip.
Any rogue dark waves can be removed with a small animated white layer (a garbage matte) tucked in between the original and the travelling matte.
In this example seeing as the sea is blue you could probably work with a chroma key tool.

Basically, on footage not created for keying, one pass is never enough.



Dave

ps. check out mokey.com for how the pros do it

[Meierhans]

Thx Alot for this Tip! I hope i understood it all right, lets see what i can do at home...

Perhabs i will upload the key & original clip, so we can do some keying competition :nod:

[spark]

i've just been reading up on photoshop and came across this damn useful tip too:

if you can separate out the rgb channels, then one will always have higher contrast for the area you want. then tweak the levels on this layer, and with a bit of manual touchup voila! a bw graded mask perfect for an alpha channel.