ipod video effect

[Seraphius]

i guess youve all seen the ipod commercial on tv

i have a green screen at home, adobe premiere, after effects photoshop and id like any suggestions as to how to do that effect?

Anything without photoshop wud be good.

I tried some keying in after effects for a while but cant get any good results

any ideas????

[skratakh]

well i'm not sure how to go about the ipod bit with the wire but just for the people what i'd do is first key out the green screen then for the rest of the video just colour the whole thing black. after effects or combustion may be better for this though and i'm pretty sure you can get free trials.

[Alan Mills]

I suspect the easiest way is to dress your actors in green bodysuits. you can then key them out and make them black easy. Depending on what you want to do with the background you may want to key that out with another colour (blue?).

I suspect the trickj is tio find a convenient way of seperating out the three core components, the background, the actors and the ipod kit. Sounds like two out of three will need keying somehow. You could always paint the ipods blue so they can be keyed out. I wouldn't fancy doing that though, unles syou don't need them afterwards.

[Chain Lube]

I've figured out a decent method in After Effects, but im not sure how well it will work in other programs as I am not famaliar with them.

You need:
Blue Ipod/Headphones prop, with the headphone wire being thick enough to show up as a different colour than the greenscreen.
Actor
Greenscreen
Program with decent chroma keying, and matte choker effects.

Film the actors doing their dancing (or head banging or whatever kind of random action you want them to do) holding the blue ipod prop with the blue headphones in there ears, or attached nearby if its not real headphones you are using. The actors should be wearing street clothes, but ones that are not coloured blue or green. Anything else would probably work fine.

Import all the footage. First, you want to key out the green background, leaving just the actor and the ipod prop. Duplicate this layer. Select the frontmost of the duplicated layers, and key out the ipod. Then adjust the alpha levels (AE - Effect>Channel>Alpha Levels) and switch the amounts of input black and input white with each other, and swith the amount of output black and output white with other. You may need to apply a matte to smooth out the edges.

Now you will have a distorted colour ipod, so to solve this problem, you apply a fill, and fill it white (AE - Effect>Render>Fill). If you already haven't you must decide on a background colour, and once you do, add a new solid in that colour and position it as the bottom layer.

Then you have to select the layer of the actor without the greenscreen, the one that got duplicated earlier. You have to play around with the levels until this actor is tinted the colour of the background. Once this is finished, you have to adjust the layers brightness and contrast until the actor is almost entirely black, with just a tiny bit of the tinted colour showing through. You may need to keyfram the brightness and contrast settings if the actor moves into different lighting causing more or less colour to come through. The keyframe keeps it consistent.

After that you can apply the text, in white font, Lucida Grande, with the character spacing condensed a little bit.


And there you have it, an Ipod style ad. If this method does not work, please let me know so I can improve it, as I created this method in theory, not in practice, because of lack of access to a blue/greenscreen.


Peace

Chain Lube

[irishmark]

nice one chain lube

that's pretty much spot on how I would do it

[CMS_Edit]

Any one got any examples? Id love to see peoples efforts at this...