MATRIX COW

[Frank Hardie]

“A cow in a field, grazing, just doing his thing but his “body” or silhoutte is filled with the typical matrix rain fx. ”

Sorry to have to tell you this but cows are female.

[Curious Turtle]

Welcome to the glorious world of rotoscoping.

Draw a mask (or masks, as this will probably makee it easier to have separate masks for different areas), keyframe, move further into the footage, move masks, lather, rinse, repeat. It’s fun. No really.

If you’ve got some budget then take a serious look at Motor, it is a revelation. Otherwise, settle in and relax with your iPod and Wacom tablet.

Good luck with your project,
Ben

Curious Turtle Professional Video
Training | Editing |Support

http://www.curiousturtle.com

[Mark Fogarty]

Huh??!!?

Then where do calves come from? Spontaneous Generation?

Around here cows come in two gender flavors… female AND male. Perhaps you mean that milking cows are all female.

[Randall Murphy]

Ogrus, this IS really a great website and the best info on the net for video. Why this thread has taken a turn for the worse is beyond me. You NEVER once mentioned anyting about reproducing cows and why this topic came up (cows vs. bulls) is rediculous. What you are doing is very creative and I’m sure there’s a way to do it, I’m sure Andrew Kramer would know. He’s very good! Good luck.

When it’s time for a bashing for stupidity, bash away, but when a creative mind out-thinks yours, it’s best to keep quite.

[Mark Fogarty]

A thought for your predicament popped into my mind this afternoon so I thought I’d share it. When I logged on I noticed that somebody must have peed in skubeedoo’s corn flakes this morning.

Sorry if I offended you by my “humorous” poke at WOWfactorX. I worked to many years on a farm to pass on the comment.

Here’s a thought for your cow crisis. You say you can’t film in front of a green screen, is it possible to use a green field/hilly background as a green screen. You could slap up a junk matte, pull a key and then remove quite a bit. You could even put a rope on a cow and walk it back and forth in front of a green hill background. You’d have to rotoscope out the rope but it’s way better then the whole cow.

I think you’d be surprised how quickly you could get a walking cow shape with not a bunch of junk. I would try auto-tracing the keyed out cow shape, expand it a bit and clean up any real rough spots… then use that as your Matrix shape/matte. Like I say… much better then 100% rotoscoping.

If you aren’t able to use a green field as your GS, a black and white cow in front of a just about anything other than black and white will allow you to get a quick and dirty key that can be auto-traced and cleaned up.

I don’t know your plans but you could film a cow anywhere and slap the image into your field footage. People are most likely gonna know there was some post-production involved because of the Matrix rain effect.

Once again, sorry if I offended with a bit of “humour”. Skubeedoo is correct in one regard… the Cow is a GREAT site.

[Frank Hardie]

From Wikipedia:

“Strictly speaking, the singular noun for the domestic bovine is ox: a bull is a male ox and a cow is a female ox. That this was once the standard name for domestic bovines is shown in place names such as Oxford. But “ox” today is rarely used in this general sense, instead denoting the castrated male used as a beast of burden. Instead, “cow” is frequently used by the general population as a gender-neutral term, despite it being designated to refer solely to females. (Females of other animals, such as whales or elephants, are also called cows).”

This was never intended to be an English lesson, simply a tongue-in-cheek comment. But, if you insist on corrupting the language, go right ahead.