Composite ghost shot – Help!

[Michael Morone]

I was interested in your problem, so I decided to start playing around with clips. I did not find a great solution, but it might work for what your doing. Unfortunatley I don’t know enough about compositing, to come up with an answer, but this should work.

What you can do is put the ghosts on the top track, and the family on the track underneath. Then, make the bottom track a compositing child of the top parent track. Then, change the compositing mode of the top track to “Overlay”. Then, make sure that the child track’s compositing mode is “Source Alpha”. Then play with the opacity of the top track (The ghosts).

I know this isn’t exactly what you wanted, but I think it works somewhat.

Hope all goes well,

Michael M.

[Grant Gottschall]

Thanks for your interest, Michael. Unfortunately, I still get bleed through when I follow your suggestion. It also makes the frame much darker, which I couldn’t completely fix by adjusting the brightness of the event.

Hm. It seems like this is the kind of thing that Vegas should be able to do no sweat. We’ve got to be missing something, but what?

Thanks again.

[Edward Troxel]

Your main problem is that EVERYTHING in both videos is showing. It’s hard to make ghosts disappear behind people when they’re actually IN FRONT of the people (i.e. they’re on a track ABOVE the people). Also, the grass will be in front making the people also appear “transparent”.

One group or the other should have been greenscreen. Even then, you’d have to do something special to get the ghosts to disappear behind the people. If you use enough tracks, you may be able to come up with something eventually but you do have a LOT of issues to resolve.

How about posting an image of the ghosts, and image of the people, and an image with neither so that people can play?

Edward Troxel