hello, forumers.
would anyone suggest how to achieve the ipod commercial effect with black silhouettes against colourful backgrounds? i mean making the human characters in the footage look like those silhouettes. preferably, either in fce or imovie. any special plugins for that or something?

Hello,

Well the first thing that comes to me, is to shoot the dancing character against a green or blue screen.. where you can key the background and replace it with anything you like.. for the foreground, since you already have a mask, you can use the "invert" function which most good programs have, and now you will have a different masked area whch you can now use to fill with a color or gradient..(this is you silouhette)

I have not tried something like this using FCP, but I am sure it can be done with a program like After Effects..

Mike Moncrief

I have done it in Premiere Pro 2.0 when I was playing with my home green screen stuff. The above method was exactly how I did it. I just checked in FCE HD and the chroma keyer did have an invert mask option so you should be good to go but I have not used it my self.