best way to scale video action but retain consistent background

[Joe Barta iv]

To create your fade at the end:
Create a Black Video Clip (File/New/Black Video), place it above all other tracks on the timeline, then put a dissolve at the head of the black clip. That way everything goes to black at once and you don’t have to worry about things going transparent in the middle of the fade.

Bars & Tone
SALUTE!

[Anne Mortensen]

Thanks Joe!

Will give that a go then… 🙂

I’ll let you know how it goes…..

[Gabriel Sanchez]

You can mask the subject with a luma key and add the background you want. Then you can also nest the sequence into another one, so all the videotracks will be only one now, and apply a Disolve transition to the end
Regards

[Anne Mortensen]

Thank you Gabriel. I will have to play around a bit more with nesting, which I can do tomorrow as well…I may have some questions when I give that a go and will let you know.

But in the meantime, I had a look around for nesting techniques, and this is what I found: https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/nesting-in-adobe-premiere-pro/

In the meantime, this is the image setup. All sitters are positioned as in the image below…. except with varying tones and positions. Some are perfect in that they are perfectly centered and plenty of space above the head. Some are slightly off and some a bit more off center which is what is causing the problem.

screenshot2013-03-14at22.48.41.png

All sitters are on the same background.

thanks for your help!

[Anne Mortensen]

Oh, and this is the black gap I’ve been talking about. As I move the subject downwards to match all the others in scale and position, this sort of black gap is the consequence:

[Gabriel Sanchez]

I think this is a work for After Effects. You can easily rotoscope all the talking heads with the rotobrush, adjust all sizes and position and add a background for all. Having it as a PPro sequence you can send it to AE with dynamic link, and when going back to PPro you´ll have the sequence updated with all the changes made.
Regards

[Adam Smith]

Hi Anne, I’ve got two quick-and-dirty ideas for you:

I don’t know how consistent you were with lighting, but my first thought is to place footage of one of the other headshots behind this one. You might need to feather the top edge of your foreground shot a bit, but hopefully it could be an easy fix.

If the grey gradients are too different, then I’d export a frame for Photoshop and make a patch. You can try scaling the top lines up to fill the hole, but you may get stripes that you’d then have to blur, and then you might need to add grain to match the rest.

-Adam

– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Anne Mortensen]

Hi Joe,

I know it’s taken a while for me to get back with some results, but your way of doing it works. What I did is elongate the black video slightly longer than the clips to fade off and added the dip to black and it all faded out at the same time!

It’s brilliant, and seems to be the easiest way to fix the gaps.

Now, all I have to do is remember how that 4 point garbage matte was constructed in the first place!!!

This particular Philip piece had all three sides showing black gaps. Hence the original clip was duplicated 3 times and all were stacked on top of each other. Then, a 4 point matte was applied to each one to cover a particular side – top, left, right. Then the fade to black transitions were applied to each track – all 4 (the 3 dups and the original). That’s as far as I got.

So, with your suggestion added, it finally all stacks up.

Anyway, here’s the screenshot of the edit on the timeline that worked to fade out the whole scene similtaneously on the Philip clips:

Thank you!!

[Anne Mortensen]

Hi Adam,

I tried this approach tonight, playing around with layering different videos with each other to see what would best match. At the moment, the grays are too different to layer with each other.

Eventually, I’m going to have to get all of them very similar in colour and scale – work I will be doing in after effects this week.

If I can’t recall how to work the garbage matte approach my assistant did with the Philip clip, I will do this approach as it should work after my colour work – particularly with that extra bit of feather at the edge.

Fortunately, I have only 4 clips that need that this gap-fill kind of fix, so I can experiment with the best option.

Thank you!

Anne

[Anne Mortensen]

Oh, by the way – each shot had the same background colour gray. But because it was all shot in a daylight studio and on different days and times of day, and that’s what’s caused the differences in hues of the background.

Thank goodness for after effects!!!