How can it be done ?…….Help me?

[Antony Buonomo]

It’s hard to know exactly without seeing your footage, but I think you need to search the COW for ‘rotoscoping’.

A

Vertigo Productions
https://www.vertigo.co.uk

[Joe Moya]

Your problem sounds more like a need for rotoscoping…

[Jiri Fiala]

Basically, you will have to mask out areas you want to cut out. Select the Pen tool and draw masks around actors and/or areas you want to remain in the shot.

Break the bodies into several parts (leg, head, torso…) so you will have easier jobs animating the mask. Try to keep those masks as simple as possible. Feather them a pixel or two.

And for God’s sake, before animating your masks, make sure you have the stopwatch enabled on “Mask Shape” :o)) I have animated way too many masks only to find I haven’t enabled the stopwatch.

This seems difficult, but can be done. You may find that you’ll be better off using green screen next time :o)

[Steve Roberts]

Yep. Just to add or paraphrase:

1. draw in rotobezier mode.
2. the goal is to optimize your masks by having as few vertices as possible.
3. when in rotobezier mode, place points where the curve of the shape changes (bigger to smaller, concave to convex) and place points closer together where curves are tighter.
4. the stopwatch will make sure you have keyframes for your mask shape.
5. your object (person, whatever) will change shape in a particular direction, then that direction will usually change. It’s best to only set keys at those direction changes. For instance, the shape will get bigger, then smaller. Make the key where it changes from getting bigger to getting smaller. The same goes for moving to the right, then moving to the left. This way you let AE do the interpolation, and you don’t have to set keyframes on every frame. Hopefully — it depends on how the object changes shape.

Oh, and if you didn’t already know this, the point of keying is to use a background whose colour is not present in the foreground. White background and white dress — bad idea.

And to the camera (and AE), it’s not a white dress or background: they’re both in shades of gray. This is why greenscreens are lit well and evenly, to present pure green (not grayish, or brownish green due to shade and shadows) to the camera and keying software. If the background is not lit to show a pure colour (such as RGB 0,255,0), it will have shades of gray, just like the foreground will. You want to remove or minimize those shades of gray in the background, since you can’t control the gray (just the green, through wardrobe and distance from the greenscreen) in the foreground talent. So: no gray in the background, just pure, well-lit green.