[Eddy Rose]

You have to pre-comp particular before you can mask it,,

[Eddy Rose]

do you have an adjustment layer in between the form layer and the floor layer?

Cos that could be it

[Eddy Rose]

I’m a bog fan of form. If you can actually pull this off using it you have to post a link!

[Eddy Rose]

Wow everyone thanks for the great response!

So I was looking over the footage for some shots to post and I realized maybe the background isn’t totally unusable in a lot of these shots,, it just has a lot of shadows around the edges and seriously needs to be evened out from shot to shot. I think the perfectionist in me was just so dead set on having the background be exactly the same from shot to shot that I became fixated on keying out each and every clip. But I guess sometimes compromise is the best option,

Wieger de Leur – You’re right, with a 3d keyer like primatte, a pixel color can either be opaque, spill, semi trans, or trans. No amount of keying magic will make it so a pixel color is opaque in the foreground and trans in the BG.

Gary Hazen – Lol looks like you solved the mystery of the low budget music video. I think I really needed to accept that this wasn’t going to be a masterpiece and try working with the background. Adding a vignette around the edges should help with the nasty shadows and some color correction will be required to get the BG to even from shot to shot.

Michael Szalapski – agreed. If they don’t like an inconsistent BG we can talk about rotoscoping. But there is NO WAY I will do that for free, rotoscoping should NEVER be done for free. In fact as we speak I am questioning a “rotoscoping internship” in the no pay forum.

Dave LaRonde – Wow, you always have these great solutions, how do you do it? I made this really sweet bass responsive smoke/ribbon effect Trapcode Form that I want to put behind the girls, so there will still be some shots I’m going to insist on keying. Your idea sound like a great way to tackle the tougher shots w/o rotoscoping. I can’t wait to try it,, I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m going to post some shots around 6/7ish if anyone want to see what I’ve done using their advice or just have a good laugh at some low budget dancers.

[Eddy Rose]

if you’re going to use AE I’d say use time remapping (Layer>Enable Time Remapping)

It’s pretty easy one you understand the basics,, there’s a really great tutorial by Aharon Rabinowitz that explains it pretty thoroughly. The tutorial is for freeze framing, but it covers slomo as well.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/Freeze_Frame.php

[Eddy Rose]

Playing off the fact it was a crummy image was the best idea anyone could have come up with,, there was seriously no salvaging this footage. So I cleaned it up best I could then added some effects to achieve that grungy look the kids are so crazy about. It’s looking pretty good now that the noise and grain looks intentional.

Thanks for the idea Dave!!

[Eddy Rose]

there’s no way to color on a video in real time in Photoshop,, but what you can do is bring the video into AE go to Composition>Add to Render Queue and in the RenderQueue window click on OutputModule then choose to export it as a filmstrip rather than a Quicktime.

What you will wind up with is a .flm which is basically every frame of your video lined up on a single image. Then bring it into photoshop and scribble on it to your hearts content. You can even do simple animations, for instance, if you want a wiggly line in your video, draw a line down the film strip. Be sure that when you’re done you save it in it’s original .flm format.

Now here’s the cool thing,, you can bring the .flm image into AE and it plays it like a video! The drawings on top will be jumpy and jittery, so this technique is great for scribbles. Just export it as a quicktime when you’re done.

*Note:You may want to change the frame rate of the original comp so the filmstrip doesn’t have too many images

This technique is also great for adding noise and grain to create an old time movie effect, or for applying PS filters that AE doesn’t have.

[Eddy Rose]

wow! what a brilliantly simple solution! I guess I was so caught up tweaking particular I didn’t even think to use a simpler effect lol

neways thanks alot!