FCP 7 – Gaussian Blur Background

[David Roth weiss]

If your subject moves at all while chatting to camera you’re going to have a tough time, as you’ll probably be rotoscoping, or fixing a zillion keyframes on a frame by frame basis. Adobe has an automated plugin for rotoscoping, but it doesn’t work perfectly, meaning you’d still have to fix many of its mistakes on a frame by frame basis. Shooting with a soft background is NOT one of those things best fixed in post.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy forum.

[Nick Meyers]

a lot depends on how detailed / accurate you want the separation between fg/bg to be.
if you don’t want too much detail / accuracy, then FCP7 can do the job.

the basics are pretty obvious
duplicate your clip/s into two layers, say V1, V2, (option short drag a clip upwards to dupe it)
apply a blur or defaces to V1, apply a garbage matte to V2.
it could be as simple as a diopter effect, where there’s a simple soft line delineating the bg,
or a more complex shape around your fg subject.
keep the shape loose so you don’t have to do a zillion key-frames.

see if you can still find the Paul Crisp garbage metres on line somewhere.
with those you can keyframe the position of your shape as a whole.
makes life a lot easier.

for anything more complex however, you’d need to go outside of FCP7.
Resolve is free, and has these sorts of tools.

cheers,
nick

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, when I did this the Paul Crisp multi-point mask tools were a Godsend, especially since they could be feathered. If you do a DEEEP search of the COW archives for Paul Crisp it may turn up still-not-dead link to those masks, which came in 4,6, and 12-point versions, maybe more.