Motion tracking

reece

hi Folks,
I'm interested in doing a scene where an object, like a car, retains it's color whilst everything else is in black and white. Do ye know of any motion tracking plug-ins for this from a pc point of view - adobe/pinnacle etc, or if motion tracking comes standard with certain pc editing packages
cheers
reece

Freelancer

reece wrote:

hi Folks,
I'm interested in doing a scene where an object, like a car, retains it's color whilst everything else is in black and white. Do ye know of any motion tracking plug-ins for this from a pc point of view - adobe/pinnacle etc, or if motion tracking comes standard with certain pc editing packages
cheers
reece

For starts this isn't a motion affect its a colour effect. Colour isn't movement. And no motion tracker is going to look at this blop of blue, and be able to maintain its colour while bleeding the rest


After effects should allow you to key the specific colour of the car, and remove every other colour. The obvious problem is that if your car is say, blue, anything else blue in the shot will also remain blue. So you need to set the shot up before shooting it. Remember 90% of all visual effects to work, need to be planned before shooting to work.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Well you should be able to motion track an adjustment-layer (say with 100% / 0% saturation) with a car-shaped mask onto the car footage... although if the rotational view of the car changes lot (and hence the 2d shape of the car also changes), you'll find yourself doing a lot of manual keyframing... both updating your mask and making sure the motion tracker hasn't lost its target, which is probably going to be a real time-whore if it's a long scene with complex camera movements.
Either way I don't think it's gonna be a 10 minute job, motion tracking or not.

But as Freelancer said, if there's anything you can do to make things easier, make sure you know about it before shooting the footage (especially if a reshoot is hard/impossible)... I'd suggest a few dry runs to see what works and what doesn't.... save you from working with nightmare footage that would have been oh-so much easier if only you'd done something differently.

my 2c

Lump

Pinnacle Pro Editions 2nd Colour Correction will di it, and indeed you can key frame it to track the car. It costs €500 or something like that though. It's a really powerful system.

John

sdLOVE

with after effects you could just put in a coloured layer on top with a grayscale version of the layer underneath then use vector paint and erase everything around the car on the top layer frame by frame. You could also make a mask and animate the mask shape over time but either way to get best results you are going to have to rotoscope it.

reece

Freelancer wrote:

For starts this isn't a motion affect its a colour effect. Colour isn't movement.

correct, however, I want a plug-in that tracks the object, and allows you to create a travelling matte. I can add the color effects later. There's something like that available for final cut pro. just want to save myself alot of time rotoscoping

reece

Lump wrote:

Pinnacle Pro Editions 2nd Colour Correction will di it, and indeed you can key frame it to track the car. It costs €500 or something like that though. It's a really powerful system.

John

cheers john, might try to tack down an evaluation version before I splash out.

Lump

You wont get one, afaik they don't do it. And just incase you're thinking of it, you wont get one online either Oh and it's secondary colour correction


John

Freelancer

reece wrote:

correct, however, I want a plug-in that tracks the object, and allows you to create a travelling matte. I can add the color effects later. There's something like that available for final cut pro. just want to save myself alot of time rotoscoping

Okay but what you need to understand theres nothing that understands how to treat or follow an object. Theres no software that goes "oh look thats a car I'll track that. Doneky Style suggestion for the matte key works if it's just travelling across one plane, on one line of motion, it's alot more difficult to create a matte key for complex motion, it's the reason that those kind of effects cost money. Serious money, its labourious and time consuming, and requires specific techincal skills, and patience.

Lump

Keyframe it manually. It's not that hard.

John

Freelancer

Lump wrote:

Keyframe it manually. It's not that hard.

John

Its one of those things. To do it and do it well you need to plan in advance, the most logical way is to shoot with the car's colour being unique in the shot. The manual keyframing works again like I said if you know what is being shot in a specific line etc..... Keyframing something like this manually is labourous and without good monitors good equipment etc.... will look bad. If you wanna do this good, wanna do this cheap, get a fire red car, get a deserted street or country road, and shoot it on an overcast day.

Hey if it worked for Senior El Speilburgo...........

reece

cheers for the advice guys, I guess the lazy man's approach is out the window:)

Dustaz

I have to disagree with freelancer here. This sounds pretty easy to do by just keyframing a color correction layer. You could do it pretty quickly with Avid dv express (im assuming Animatte is included in that package). Im also pretty sure i was able to do something very similar pretty easily on After Effects.

Obviously, if you havent shot the footage yet its better to shoot it with this in mind, but its certainly very doable with existing footage.

Freelancer

Dustaz wrote:

I have to disagree with freelancer here. This sounds pretty easy to do by just keyframing a color correction layer. You could do it pretty quickly with Avid dv express (im assuming Animatte is included in that package). Im also pretty sure i was able to do something very similar pretty easily on After Effects.

Obviously, if you havent shot the footage yet its better to shoot it with this in mind, but its certainly very doable with existing footage.

Hmmmmm Really? Now theres something I gotta try when I got me an avid and an hour to kill.

Dustaz

Yeh, i just did it there as a test while im waiting for rushes

It takes a little time and a bit of adjustement, but it works well.

Lump

Indeed it is easy to do, I have done it before on a multitude of systems, Avid, ES3, Pinnacle, FCP.... all fun and games Once you get your head around keyframes it's easy enough, it's up to you how pedantic (Spelling?) you want to be, or how much your audience will spot it

John

Lump

Also, using Pinnacle or Avid Liquid Pro as it is now know since Avid bought Pinnacle, it will take a specific colour from the frame, using the droper, it'll select the colour you want to adjust and you can adjust one colour. Adjusting the parameters as you would in photoshop to adjust the tolerance.

Pinnacle/Avid Site wrote:

Secondary Color Correction
Choose specific colors to correct within a clip.
Select which color to correct within a shot. Change red to blue. Make everything else black and white. Multi-point tone and color balancing offering both color correction and creative color tools.

John