• Adobe After Effects

  Colorization of B&W videos on AE CS5

  Posted by Ryan Castle on October 19, 2011 at 4:01 pm

  I have an idea to colorize black and white videos in After Effects, and please comment if you have anything to improve it, because I really want to color my old movies.

  I plan to open my video
  Than make a new null object
  Then use Motion Tracking on the null object layer
  Then use masking and color correction to add the color
  Attach the color layer to the motion tracked null object

  Can this work? I am new to AE, so please pardon. Also, I have a part of my black and white film where a man move his head and hands a lot, how can I keep the color layer in sync with the movement of his hands and body, and not have the color overlap into the background?
  Thank you for any help you can give.

  Michael Szalapski replied 14 years, 9 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Walter Soyka

  October 19, 2011 at 4:19 pm

  You’ll have to rotoscope [link].

  AE CS5’s Rotobrush may be helpful, as would Imagineer’s Mocha-AE (bundled with After Effects).

  Walter Soyka
  Principal & Designer at Keen Live
  Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
  RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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• 

  Michael Szalapski

  October 19, 2011 at 6:55 pm

  Walter neglected to mention that you’ll want to update your music collection and set it on repeat. You have many, many hours of very tedious work ahead of you.

  – The Great Szalam
  (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

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