Noobie asks for help

[Nicholas Vulpis]

hi all i posted in wrong forum earlier
I have editing Questions i hope u can all answer

1-is tehre a program that will let me remove background video keep forground and drop it into a seperate background video other than keying?

2- what else is there other than after effects 6 i got the demo version which doesnt seem to tell much and looks like its just photos?

3-how can i shoot time lapse?
4-where can i get stock footage that i dont have to pay for im a noobie 0 experience and 0 dollars and cant afford to buy a timelapse sunset,sunrise or waterfall or a castle explored lets say...

[John Britt]

Please elaborate on your problems with After Effects. I've been using After Effects 5.5 for a couple of years and recently tried out the AE 6 demo. That demo is pretty much fully-functioning and very powerful. There's a reason why AE is used by so many professionals: it's powerful and incredibly useful -- like a Photoshop for video, as they say. I'm confused by what you mean by "looks like it's just photos"

[Nicholas Vulpis]

when i read info about keying i tried color keying as i dont have green/blue screen and tried to take out certain background color or tried to make background transparent even if it was slightly visible just to try it and no matter what i had no options to choose one i had imported a video

[John Britt]

It's been a couple of months since I demo'ed AE 6, but I seem to remember that the keying features were disabled in the demo. From what I've read, Adobe vastly improved the keying engine on AE 6 and that it works very well now -- possibly they disabled it for the demo b/c they don't want some ambitious videographers to get their otherwise expensive keying projects done for free during the 30 trial days.

Premiere also has various keying options as well. They are not as powerful as After Effects, but they do work. Maybe try the Premiere demo (the new one is Premiere Pro, which I do not have; I am using Premiere 6.5).

You'll have to be careful with what you are trying to do. When chroma keying, you can't just choose a "background color" -- if that color is repeated in the foreground element as well, it will be keyed out there, too. Regardless, experiment your heart out -- it's the best way to learn (and come up with new ideas that no one else ever thought of!)

[Rob Lohman]

Nicholas: please use a better thread title next time. "Noobie asks
for help" doesn't tell anyone anything about your problems. In
this case "help needed with AE6" would have been a way better
title!

Stock footage is almost never free. Why? Because people shot
it and want to make some money of it. So if you can't afford a
stock footage disc then I suggest you make movies with stuff
you can shoot yourself.

Stock footage usually needs a lot of compositing work to look
realistic. That's certainly something I would not want to do as
a "noobie" (as you call yourself).

[Ed Smith]

Nicholas,

To shoot timelapse you need a camera that is able to do it. I Know the Canon XL1s can and also the Sony TRV900 can. I expect there are other models which have this function.

If however you are talking about timelapse in editing then thats a whole new kettle of fish.

Please elaborate on what you mean by timelapse.

Cheers,

Ed

[Nicholas Vulpis]

hey all thanks for the help sorry for bad post title
yea can u do time lapse in editing im trying premierpro shortly
thanx for info on stock footage also

[Rob Lohman]

Nicholas: also see this thread on stock footage

[Ed Smith]

Nicholas,

I take it that you would have captured a scene in real time. You then need to capture it into your computer and for a simple effect speed the footage up, that will give a timelapse type of effect. It sometimes looks good if you put a motion blur effect on it as well.

You could every 25 frames take 25 frames out and so on. This again would create a timelapse type of effect, but take a long time to do if you have a lot of footage.

However the best way for timelapse is to do it in-camera, it will save a lot of tape space and will be easier to edit.

cheers,

Ed