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Surfing Footage Effects
Hi,
I’m trying to apply filters to footage of surfing to make some really cool-looking surfing videos. One of the things I’m trying to do is take video of a surfer, color the surfer and his board all white, and color everything else black. I have tried a number of methods.Vectorize Color Filter in FCP6 gets close but does not give me proper outline of the surfer and board
Magic wand in Photoshop frame-by-frame takes way too long and hand-painting is not consistent enough
I cannot get the Track Motion feature in After Effects or Motion to apply an effect to the moving object. I can track the motion of the surfer in After Effects and Motion, but I cannot apply any effect to the motion track nor to the exact shape of the surfer and his boardPlease help! I will send stills of what I am talking about. I am making a next-generation surf video and have spent tons and tons of hours researching and still cannot find the solution. This post is a last-ditch effort. Any help with this effect or cool unusual ideas that might work with surf footage would be very much appreciated, thanks
Matthew -
3 Replies
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One of the things I’m trying to do is take video of a surfer, color the surfer and his board all white, and color everything else black
There’s a couple of ways to approach this, here’s one;
you’ll key out the ocean and create a matte. once the matte is created you can apply effects to one side without affecting the other. you may need to take a couple of passes at it but this is what we do =)
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MOTIONOLOGIST
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What exactly do you mean by key out the ocean and create a matte? I have been working with the 8-point matte but it is almost impossible to get the matte perfectly around the surfer. Thanks so much for replying, I really appreciate the help 🙂
Matthew -
What exactly do you mean by key out the ocean and create a matte?
Basically you would cut out the surfer from the ocean using a color keyer (like ‘keylight’). Barend has a great tutorial on the process of matte creation:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/onneweer_barend/keyingtut.phpI have been working with the 8-point matte but it is almost impossible to get the matte perfectly around the surfer
thats another way to approach it, by rotoscoping. yes you would need more points, use the pen tool to create your shapes.
I would break up the rotoing to the major shapes of the body. torso, right upper arm, right fore arm, left upper arm..etc..(so a dedicated animated mask per part) and keyframe every 5 or 10 frames.It’s hard to tell what would be the best path to go without seeing the footage.
There may be a filter that can do what your describing. But I believe these two ways would give you the most control over what you want the surfer or the ocean to look like without affecting the other.
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MOTIONOLOGIST
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