Newbie: making a coin vanish

[Stedwick]

Ok, I want to put a coin on a table, wave my hand over it, and have it vanish. It seems like that shouldn't be too hard, but I'm completely new at this video editing stuff.

Also, I plan to go on for another few minutes after this, so I can't just go in and manually edit every frame. I mean, I can manually edit the few frames where my hand passes over the coin no problem and paint the table on top of the coin so it vanishes, but how do I keep that tiny area of the video permanently "painted over" while I go on with the rest of the video?

Any help is appreciated, and thanks!

Stedwick

oh, and I'll be using premier.

[Alan Mills]

Why not just cut to a closeup of you during some key dialogue and have someone remove the coin from the table. That way you only have to 'paint' a few frames as you said.

Or, put a mask over the area of the table where the cin is and make that area transparent.. Have a static shot of the 'empty' table behind it so you see that rather than the coin.

[OnTheWay]

why not learn how to do the trick, its a very simple magic trick!
david blaine has used it a lot...

[skratakh]

once again i feel the need to mention discreet combustion, this is one of the main things the software was designed for, you can use it to track the pixels that make up the coin and then clone some footage of the table, the s/w will then blend it in seemlessly for the whole time the coin is in shot. this is how they do it on tv, like when they place markers on the floor etc to place 3d characters the markers are then covered over in seconds using discreets combustion, www.discreet.com, you can download a free trial and the showcase videos will explain everything you need to know.

[Alan Mills]

Agreed. i'm sure it's almost as easy to do this in Combustion as it is in After Effects However, I read the initial post as looking for a work around to achieve the same effect in Premiere.

As OnTheWay said, it may just be easier to have a small portion of the table cloth material in your hand and 'invisbly' drop it over the coin, hiding the coin after the hand has passed over it.

[skratakh]

yer i suppose the simple ways work aswell, i'm just starting to see the power of the software though so i feel the need to mention it. i was going by the idea of painting over the coin rather than alternatives. another idea would be to have the coin filmed on say a green piece of paper then green screen it and super impose it onto the table then simply make it vanish by just cutting the video as the hand passes over.

[Alan Mills]

or, and this will work in just premiere, do a picture-in-picture effect. Offset the second layer and crop it down leaving just a small piece of table visible. Then move the cropped clip so that it is over the top of the coin on layer 1. Easy!

Not played with crop in Premiere but the result might be noticeable if it only give a hard edge. The effects will be much better if a feathered edge can be achieved. Anyone?

[skratakh]

yer thats pretty much the jist of what i was thinkin, i suppose you could do a radial blur and set it to zoom that could do it, i'm not sure about the feathering