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Silhouette Video?
Is there a quick and fairly tiday way to silhouette video, for example, to separate a person from a background, w/o that person having been shot against a plain or chroma-keyable background? Not really up for drawing masks for every frame…
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5 Replies
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If the background is not plain, I don’t know how you can do it. If it wasn’t chroma, you could conceivably try to key it, and using a variety of filter, it could work. But if the background is complex, with moving objects, especially if they are of various colors which may match those in the object you want to silhouette, I don’t know how you can do it.
Rotoscoping might be your only way. Tedious, yes, but you certainly wouldn’t be the first to have to do it. Some people make a living doing it every day.
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If your camera is locked off (static on a tripod), and you have a clean plate of the background, you could try Difference Matte. You feed the effect with the clean background image, and it will create the matte by calculating the difference between the clean background and the shot.
But I find it’s very vulnerable to noise, and even more so when using DV.
Bar3nd
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I find Difference mattes work pretty good if the footage is not too noisy, and when backgrounds are fairly even coloured.
Here’s a clip I did this week using Difference Mattes, levels, and some cleaning up by animating black or white brush strokes set to overlay:
(Work in progress):
https://www.vandueren.be/stubru_afrekening_25.movThe clips were filmed with a (DV) Canon XL2, on a white background, people wore black clothes, gloves, with faces painted black.
Glasses were white. -
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I’ve done stuff like that, like when my cameraman does a quick and nasty blue screen shoot with shadows casting and the subjects arms flapping off the side.
First mask out as much of the background as you can, remember you can animate mask shapes with key frames. If you use the “Color range” filter you can select many different colours to key out. As long as none of the background colours are in your foreground subject, you should be able to get an ok result. Not as nice as the ipod ad but if you then put some kind of pattern in the background which is the same colour as the silhouette (I once used snow flake illustrations) it can hide a lot of the crappiness.
Bendex.
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