What is chromakey?

Has anyone written a Sony Movie Studio book? like the old "Tips & Tricks" series for other products?

Here is a book that is not avaliable yet:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/157820271X/qid=1105025908/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-5386369-0582536?v=glance&s=books

Chromaky is designating one color on your upper track as transparent so that everything the color reveals the lower track. What that basically means is that, if you add a video of you standing in front of green wall on the upper track and a video of the Grand Canyon on the lower track and you designate the green of that wall as transparent -- it will make it appear you are standing in front of the Grand Canyon!

The most common example of chromakey is the way the local news makes the weatherman look like he's standing in front of a huge weather map.

It's a fun tool. Definitely play with it.

This web page (http://www.cmpbooks.com/product/1301) says the book will be available April 1, 2005. I'll buy it!

There was a good discussion of multiple video tracks in this thread: http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=12&MessageID=340303

Thanks for the info on the book and the thread info... I'm check it out!

I use this as follows:

I film my daughers marching band. I also shoot some other shots such as parents in the stands, players on the side line watching the half time show etc etc.

When I edit the movie, I put some of those shots on the overlay track. I take away the sound of those shots and the result is that you see a parent watching the half time show and the sound track of the actual perfomance is playing.
No one will ever notice that the shot of the parent was not taken while the actual perfomance was done.

This is a great way to add some variety to your shots.

ChristerTX,

On the overlay track you set some transparency level? or is it not necessary?

You can do it if you want but I'm not using it for what I'm describing here.
Anything on the overlay track will just replace what is on the main track for the duration of the clip.
If you want the transition smoother you can fade in and out by grabbing the corner of the overlay clip to create a fade.

Try it out.

Cheers / Christer

What Christer has described is known as an L-cut or a cutaway, and it's a very powerful tool for the video editor.

It means basically that you use the sound of one clip as a continuity (and it may be a performance, a wedding or someone speaking) as you cut to video of people reacting of visuals to support the soundtrack.

Having two soundtracks makes that trick easy because the visuals you add to the upper layer don't affect what goes on on the lowe layer, where your sound is being drawn from.

The only way to pull that off with a single video track is to break the audio from the video and cut away and replace part of the video -- and then pray you can sync the video and audio back up when you come back to the original video at the end of the clip!

Cool... I have done that with video & photos but never with two video clips. Great suggestion.