Vegas 8 and Invisibility FX?

buckaroo wrote on 9/16/2007, 8:08 AM
Can Vegas 8 do invisible man fx very well? if indeed at all?

I have tried to use Commotion Pro which i think is no londer made, but used rotoscoping to paint the background back in and mask parts of the body as in this tutorial :

http://effectscorner.blogspot.com/2006/01/walking-pants-breakdown-video-part-2.html

What would be the best way to do this ( or do it in a new way) in Vegas? I think vegas is so simple to use and has been great..

I dont want to use bluescreen fx really (there are no bluescreen fx in this tutorial) so some simple roto or masking would be great.

Is vegas up to the job? has anyone produced anything like this in Vegas before?

Comments

busterkeaton wrote on 9/16/2007, 8:29 AM
Vegas does not do rotoscoping. It does not have motion tracking,so you would have to used the bezier mask tool and do it manually.

[r]Evolution wrote on 9/16/2007, 9:42 AM
The best way I can think of would be to Pre-Plan your edit and shoot your Backgound with & without your talent. Then you do not need to rotoscope or key anything. You simply switch to the BG without the talent and he just disappeared. Super clean and super easy.
buckaroo wrote on 9/16/2007, 10:43 AM
Thanks for your reply..

Sorry for being thick, but how do you meanswitch to the BG without the talent and he just disappeared?

How do i keep the clothing, and moving objects in a scene? can i paint the actor out?
GlennChan wrote on 9/16/2007, 11:39 AM
You can use the bezier mask tool to rotoscope. But it's not particularly fast + responsive and it'll take you longer than programs that are good at roto.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 9/16/2007, 1:33 PM
> can i paint the actor out?

You're close... have your actor wear a chroma green hood over their face and hands then just key them out with the chroma keyer. The right cloth should be easy to find in any fabric store.

~jr
Soniclight wrote on 9/16/2007, 1:45 PM
Buckaroo,
There is a specific tutorial for this online that was suggested here at this forum but I just couldn't find it right now (--- anyone else know the one I'm talking about? ---). In the mean time check the page below, it's about fine-tuning chroma-keying for green screen or blue screen.

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 9/16/2007, 2:06 PM
shoot the scene once w/o the person, and then once with the person wearing a full body green suit, then just key out the color of the suit and it will be the footage behind him that you shot when he wasn't in the scene.

This will work fine for when you're already invisible, however making the person become invisible will be somewhat trickier and you're probably going to have to do a bit of rotoscoping to make him go away, and come back. that's the way to make him disappear and re-appear for the beginning and ending of the scenes. It will save you DRASTIC amounts of time to not rotoscope him out on the entire sequence.

Dave
GlennChan wrote on 9/16/2007, 2:29 PM
The problem with a suit is that there will be folds in the clothing with shadow. That can be very difficult to key and possibly require roto to fix.

The way they did the pants effect, you'd save very little time by getting the actor to wear a green suit. You also need to spend time doing the paint + comp work.
farss wrote on 9/16/2007, 3:12 PM
Glenn is so right. There's this general assumption that chroma keying can do anything but the reality is it can create more issues than it solves. Spill is one of them, shooting black limbo and using a luma key can avoid that problem.
Even avoiding the issue of getting the key to work or using roto you've still got a pretty big problem of what do you replace the masked out bits with. Unless you've got a totally locked off camera and the only thing in the shot is the Invisible Man you've got a real issue. Simple example, Invisible Man walks in front of another person. The IM has covered the other person and that person is not in your background plate. So if you think that through you have to shoot everything that might move in separate shots and then composite all that. But if your camera moves all the layers have to track. Now you need cameras with motion control and none of that stuff is cheap.
In the end I think the question of which software to use is trivial. Preplanning and testing along with very tightly controlled shooting is the key to getting this to work.

Bob.