how to turn a scene from B&W to color in progression?

[David Roth weiss]

To do this after the fact you would first have to rotoscope the running girl by hand in every frame to separate from her surroundings. Thats tough enough for starters. Then, create at least four layers, and probably several more from your original. At a miniumum you would need the following layers: 1) B&W layer of the girl running; 2) color layer of the girl running; 3) B&W layer of the field; color layer of the field. Then, using travel matts and dissolves you would figure out a way to seamlessly transition parts of the frame from B&W to color as she progresses deeper into the frame.

However, the bottom line is it would be next to impossible to make it work properly because you would need to have additional layers and various elements in the frame to fake 3D space in a limited 2D environment.

Next time just shoot the girl running in toward a large green screen. Shoot bg plates of the field and objects in space like bushes and trees that she passe. And finally, have a wonderful compositor create a virtual world for the girl to run through.

If you had all the resources of a guy like Robert Rodrigues you might be able to pull it off…

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[13]

Here is a video that covers several of the things that David talked about. Yours however with the person running will require much more work.

[Adam Smith]

Is the girl black and white or color? Does she need to be perfectly normal looking in a black and white world, or could her color have soft edges? Also, is she moving towards/away from the camera or is the camera panning to follow her as she passes by?

If it has to be perfect, then you’ve got a lot of painstaking rotoscoping to do. If it can be artistically soft then maybe you can get by with a much simpler roto-job – the softer the edges and more bleed you’re willing to accept, the easier the job will be. Also consider how the background will be changing.. if the transition is behind her then you’ll have to do a decent job of masking all of her edges, whereas if the transition happens under her, then you can probably go simpler on masking her back half since she’ll be color on color anyways.

—
Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Jonomaloney]

hey zrb123,

Thanks for the reply on my question.

In your post you said you gave a video that talked about what I was looking to do. But there is no link to any video in the post….At least I dont see one, I hope Im not being an idiot and just missing it. If you could send me the link it would be much appreciated.

Thanks Again,
Jon

[13]

Sorry

https://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/segment_detail.asp?sid=209&sortby=&page=1&kwid=0&show=all_videos

[David Roth weiss]

Nice example to show Jon the basics… His concept is vastly more complicated however. As previously mentioned, his girl is running thus complicating the rotoscoping immensely and pretty much guarantying roto of every frame.

And in addition, she’s running deeper into the frame, thus introducing the need to deal with shifting B&W to color gradually in 3D space. To pull that off many elements in the scene would have to seem to shift color over time along the z-axis from front to back. For example, if she passed a tree, that tree would start out in B&W and would have to gradually shift to color from front to back as she moves past it. Not that difficult with a travel matte and several layers, but that would have to be done convincingly with every foreground object and with the ground beneath her feet, etc., etc, etc. Difficult!!!

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.