newbie questions

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi David,

Unfortunately you are wanting to accomplish advanced compositing tricks with editing software and it is not well-suited to that task.

#1 – As for changing hair color, if the hair was bright green or bright pink to start with, you may have some success, but going blonde to red head or something, not so much! First off, most camcorders throw away a ton of color information when compressing video. The detail is kept, but the human eye doesn’t notice lower color fidelity so that’s the first thing to go.

However…when you try to key this footage, the computer knows the color data is missing and that makes it hard to get clean results with color keying. A fix is to connect the live camera output to an external recording such as Atomos or Black Magic makes and those will record a large (less-compressed) file as ProRes with 4:2:2 color versus the in-camera recording like AVCHD which is very compressed and uses 4:2:0 color usually. This file will provide better keying results.

In any event, for any kind of keying work, lighting is very critical when shooting the footage. You’ll never get a decent key from poorly-lit footage in any format.

#2 – To remove eyes on moving video, you’ll need motion tracking. Not something I’ve worked with, but Mocha is a very popular software for that. I believe a light version of Mocha is included with After Effects CC, not sure if there might be Premiere CS6 plug-in available yet?

Alternately, if the clip is short, it is possible to import a video clip into Photoshop, then paint on each individual frame, then export again. So in theory, if you don’t mind tedious work, you could “rotoscope” the eyes out frame by frame.

#3 – Not going to happen. After Effects might have a shattering effect built-in, or maybe available from third-party, but it would be applied to the source video clip then it would break into pieces. I don’t know how you would get a video clip mapped onto separate shards of glass in a separate clip.

Hint: if Hollywood-style compositing effects were easy…everyone would be doing it and it wouldn’t cost $100 million to make a movie ????

Keyboard shortcuts – on a PC, the arrow keys will help you. LEFT and RIGHT arrows move 1 frame at a time, but hold SHIFT and they move 5 frames at a time. UP and DOWN arrows jump to NEXT and PREVIOUS cuts.

The PLUS and MINUS keys (+ and -) will zoom the timeline in and out to change the time scale.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Tero Ahlfors]

[david furst] “i’ve just started using premiere pro”

Read the manual.

[david furst] “problem 1 – how can i change the hair color of a model in a scene ?”

Either reshoot the scene, hire a professional VFX artist or learn After Effects or Fusion or another compositing software.

[david furst] “problem 2 – i want to cut out the eyes of a figure on-screen”

Pretty much the same answer as the previous but you probably don’t need a reshoot.

[david furst] “problem 3 – on v1, i have a clip showing a slo-mo of a pane of glass shattering. on v2, i have the primary footage. the effect i’m looking for is compositing the primary footage onto the shattering glass, so it looks like it’s the primary that’s shattering.”

You can’t do this in Premiere.

[david furst] “- how can i get rid of those annoying little pop-up hint bubbles that appear whenever i move the mouse into the project media window?”

There might be a setting in the preferences for that. That said it’s actually handy to see footage information at a glance.

[david furst] “- how can i move the cursor to the beginning or end of the next/previous clip?”

Up/down on the cursor keys

[david furst] “- how can i move the cursor by larger arbitrary steps than just 5 frames [for example, 1-second or n-second intervals], irrespective of markers?”

You can move forward in the sequence by having nothing selected and then hitting the plus key on the numpad and inputting the time you want to jump forward.

[David Furst]

thank you both for your replies. very good info there! that clears up a lot of the mystery.

i’ve also stumbled on a huge stockpile of tutorials here on this site, currently wading through the ones on mattes and masks. i’m relieved to find out there are much easier ways to do a lot of the things i’ve been doing than the ways i’ve been doing them, right out of the box.

cheers!