Ideas for a black and white boxing scene showing red blood.

[Jeremy Garchow]

You definitely have the right idea. You would need the blood (whatever color you choose to use) to be rather unique in the scene. You can then select that color and change it to whatever you want. It won’t be easy but it’s doable. Otherwise, I would think you need to rotoscope.

Jeremy

[Rj Miles]

You might try…

Shoot the scene in color but don’t have anything else red in the scene but the blood.

Then you can create a comp with a couple of layers.

1) a B/W treatment of the total scene as the base layer.

2) then you can use a color key to create a matte of the RED, so you can overlay the red layer on top of the B/W layer.

There are a number of ways you could put together the “red only” matte layer, and probably doesn’t have to be perfect to have a nice effect. You may even be able to play around with quality of the key/matte to achieve what looks best when composited with the B/W layer.

The trick is making it easy to inverse key out everything that isn’t red. If this is not totally possible, you can use some masking to eliminate other red material you don’t want in the shot.

good luck

[13]

Watch this little FCP how to I saw a short while back

https://www.izzyvideo.com/2006/10/08/izzy-video-46-the-pleasantville-effect/

[Hasselman Jor]

Forget the keying and greenblood.
If you buy “creating motion effects in FCP” DVD from Ripple Training, you get the plugin for free. By far the easiest way !!
It was – 100 bucks – 10 000 km – 3 days.

[Zak Mussig]

This is probably the technique that the link posted above uses, but if the color is unique in your frame ( there isn’t red all over the place) you can do this with the 3-way color corrector. Limit the effect by sampling a middle value of your color (in this case red) and then adjust the color saturation and luminosity controls while looking at the matte view. When you have a good matte, go back to final view, and de-saturate your image all the way. Your red should be b & w. The last step is to check the invert mask checkbox. Now nothing will have color except your red.

This is the 1 filter way to do this… depending on your footage and experience, mattes may give you a better result.

Hope that helps,
Zak

[Ctacta]

Thanks all for replying so fast with such great info. I’ll post up the finished thing in a few weeks too show you how it came out.

Thanks again

Charlie.

[Ben Holmes]

The limit effect in the colour corrector is very useful, but I suspect may not work effectively in this case – unless the ‘blood’ is very red. Limit can be used effectively to (say) leave a red car or dress (a la Schindler’s list) in a frame, but you will be trying to do this with red-ish blood on pink skin.

You may need to first exaggerate the colours in the frame by messing with the saturation. You could also try a chroma key to replace the blood colour from your shoot with one a bit more ‘primary’. There is a filter made by CGM called ‘selective colour correction’ that basically does just that – and also gives you the ability to limit the effect to an area. It could also replace ‘green’ blood with red if required – not a bad idea as it’s a lot further from the skin tones the blood will be against. In cases where ‘limit effect’ in the 3 way CC does not work, I have often found this to be a more powerful tool.

Good luck – I suspect that good lighting will help here, and really fake blood. Sounds fun… Try a simple test before your shoot, trying a few of these techniques – cheaper than a reshoot…

Ben

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