Help me edit 250 frames in bulk, please?
 

The bird in this still took 10 seconds to fly from the far side of this fence to land in front of me. I recorded that 10 secs with XL2.

Does anyone know how I can remove the fence from this 10sec clip without editing each of 250 frames separately?

Premiere Elements 4
After Effects CS3
Photoshop Elements 2
No audio

Informed opinion from experienced editors using any NLE would be most welcome.

you pay a compositor to do it, this isnt something you can do quick and easy in any program

Brendan... Olas is right. There's no "easy" in this project.

If you want to try it yourself, learn everything you can about rotoscoping in AE. I know precious little more than rotoscoping basics, but there may be some tools in AE that will make it easier. The real danger with DIY rotoscoping is that the changes you make to a specific area of the frame will not be consistent in subsequent frames and will cause flickering or some other undesired effect.

Rotoscoping is an art that can do some amazing things but takes time and skill. That's why good rotoscope artists don't come cheap.

The good thing about this shot it has a small depth of field, I would attempt to matte paint the background then track it back in.. Alas you would have to roto around all the moving objects.

Thank you Olas, Tripp and Blake for your advice. Please don't go away just yet.

While I am trying to understand rotoscoping and the skills of the compositor, may I change the question?

Would my task be any simpler if I selected and deleted the background of the 250 frames and repositioned the flight of the bird against 250 frames of a new background?

is the camera moving?
are you zooming?

yes, rotoing out the bird and then sticking it on a new background could work.

Camera is stationary and usually not zooming, Olas. I have 20+ minutes of similar footage waiting for clever editing.

Please point me towards a practical tutorial on rotoscoping/rotoing? That could be a great help.

All my video is of wild nature and I get cheesed off when Elements 4 and After Effects go on and on about playing around with artificial graphics as if natural/wildlife video did not exist ... I wonder sometimes does everybody but me live 24/7 in a studio?

i dont use afx for comp work so i couldnt tell you how to roto in it. im sure google can help you. just search for after effects rotoscoping tutorial, or maybe its called masking in that program.

but if youre thinking of rotoing 20mins of footage then you could just aswell go and drown yourself because its a pain in the anus beyond anything you could ever imagine.

You can do this in Photoshop too (if you have Photoshop Extended found in CS3 Suite). You just import your footage (prefer Quicktime with Animation codec) and then you can use combination of Quick mask mode, magic wand and hand erasing to remove everything except the bird. Any kind of tablet will be a great help.

There's no point trying to remove just the fence and hoping the background will stay usable. You will need to comp another BG in (you can just take a still camera, slap a still shot behind your roto'ed bird and make your shot sing with some lens blur and and subtle camera movement done in AE.

Yuo can roto this in AE too, but given the great complexity of bird's movements (it's not just rotation and translation like in basic human movements), you will go nuts after rotoscoping these 250 frames.

There are some tutoes on AE roto'ing on Youtube.

Olas quote ......"i dont use afx for comp work so i couldnt tell you how to roto in it. im sure google can help you. just search for after effects rotoscoping tutorial, or maybe its called masking in that program."

Perhaps I shouldn't be using afx at all ... what I'm doing (or trying to) is video editing, for which there must be more specific software than afx (which is really about manipulating graphics).

Thank you Jiri for ... "You can do this in Photoshop too (if you have Photoshop Extended found in CS3 Suite). You just import your footage (prefer Quicktime with Animation codec) and then you can use combination of Quick mask mode, magic wand and hand erasing to remove everything except the bird. Any kind of tablet will be a great help".
I have not found P.Extended in my CS3 but I'll look again.

And this makes sense to me ... quote Jiri Fiala "There's no point trying to remove just the fence and hoping the background will stay usable. You will need to comp another BG in (you can just take a still camera, slap a still shot behind your roto'ed bird and make your shot sing with some lens blur and and subtle camera movement done in AE." I find the lasso handy too. I have suitable BGs, both stills and slow panning video clips.

What video editing software would anyone recommend for "live" footage?

Ditto: getting just the fence out would be tough in After Effects (although it would be the best tool for trying it, IMO). Getting the just the bird and completely replacing the BG would not be that bad.

I'd use a combination of several nested compositions in AE and the Motion Tracking utility, and then a combination of Auto-Traced layers and keying.

It looks like a fun challenge, I'd gladly do a short sample for you and send you the AE project file, so you could duplicate whatever techniques I use.

Andrew, thank you sincerely for this offer even if it may be too good to be true ... I am thrilled at the prospect of learning from your experiment. And it sounds much more promising than either a pain in the anus or a terminal underwater experience.

While I'm selecting a 10 second clip (or 2 x 5 seconds or whatever you suggest) I guess it would be as well to send you a few BG stills in jpeg as well? Please tell me in what format you would like to work on the clips? The obvious one to me (using a pc) would be .avi. Would you prefer it compressed to 480 x 272 (using H.264) or uncompressed? If you use Mac, that's Ok 'cos I have access to a good Mac and a son-in-law to show me how to follow your instructions.

Should I attach things to an email or send a DVD or what would suit you best? To ask you to use unedited clips posted by me on Vimeo would be a waste of your time and skills. My video quality is better than that because I used a strong tripod from a hide within 40 metres of the action. Please don't be surprised if I send you clips of black or griffon vulture flight from the same location rather than egyptian vulture. May I also send you a few stills from the same location with the fence edited out by me with Photoshop (mostly with clone + gaussian blur)? I am really looking forward to learning from you.

Now I must read up on what is meant by "a combination of several nested compositions in AE and the Motion Tracking utility, and then a combination of Auto-Traced layers and keying."

Oh, I may very well be untrue, but we'll see if that bears any relationship to how good I am...

I hope I just sent you an e-mail, check whatever account DVinfo has on file for you. If that doesn't show up, you can e-mail me: andrewjmorin at hotmail. (.com of course) Or just upload a sample clip, uncompressed please, at Game Downloads, Game Patches - FileFront.com and we can continue here in thread.

I would suggest sending it in QT JPEG full image dimensions. That way the file won't be big, will be high quality enough to be worked on and you can always swap sources on final export.

On other projects I've done comp work for, that's what we did-- I've even had success using half-resolution working files-- but my concern here is for color depth: one trick I'd like to look at is keying-out the fence, and any compression artfacts make that less possible. Same goes for trying difference mattes. I've already tried a few things on the attached jpeg posted in the OP, and the artifacts make a bad situation worse.

Besides, my goal is to teach fishing not hand out fish, and file-front allows 1 gig of file transfer with no costs at all.