Moving matte in sports footage.

[Nelson Cole]

I've looked high and low for the answer to this. Using Premiere CS3. I have some sports footage and I need to highlight one player from the rest, make this player slightly brighter inside a circle or ellipse, or dim the other players.

Can anybody walk me through this? I know I need one clip, then a duplicate one above it, then the matte, but the matte is stationary. But how do I get the matte to move with the player for the length of the clip? Do I need to use other CS3 software, or can Premiere do it?

Help would be greatly appreciated.

[Brett Griffin]

You'll have to keyframe (scale, position etc) the matte.

[Rob Johnson]

I've never done this in Premiere, but have in After Effects and it's a cinch. And in a (easier) way which uses a traveling matte instead of a mask.

Three layers - footage on bottom, Adjustment layer with levels applied in middle, and then a solid on top big enough to cover the area you want highlighted with and oval / circle mask. - Darken/lighten the middle layer as desired with levels. Set the adjustment layer to use the alpha of the solid.

All you have to do is animate the position of the solid to follow the player you want. I find that easier than having to reposition mask points every few seconds. If you have a consistent enough reference, you can of course use the motion tracker also.

[Battle Vaughan]

You can make the ellipse with the shape tool in the titler, and animate it using the travelling matte effect in PPro....use two copies of the clip, one darkened, one normal; matte the normal clip so only it shows up inside the ellipse, letting the darkend clip show through elsewhere...read about it here: Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 * Move or change the transparent area with Track Matte Key /Battle Vaughan

PS: added some screen grabs to show you the setup; in the fx window for the track you are highlighting, use the title track as the matte and use matte luma in the setup. You can vary the background brightness and contrast to suit using brightness/contrast on the lower track. Your ellipse in the title is full white, what is white will show from the top track, what is not will be transparent and show the lower track. Click the stopwatch in the position and scale motion items to keyframe the ellipse as you need. It helps to make the field for the title larger than the field of the image so you can move it around. (select in viewer, click to get size box and just drag to the size you want) /bv

[Nelson Cole]

Much obliged, Battle, Rob, and Brett. I really appreciate the screen grabs, Battle. For such a common enough effect it sure wasn't easy to track down. Either that or I was just having a brain cramp/become lazy in these Google days. Dvinfo comes through again!

[Rob Johnson]

Yes excellent idea, Battle, and rather ingenious if I may say. Also, Nelson, consider perhaps adding a blur effect to your travelling matte effect to give a slightly feathered edge rather than a harsh edge, if that's the look you're going for.

[Battle Vaughan]

Thanks, guys, glad to help. Incidentally, by using a mosiac filter on the middle track, you can use this same idea to create a "witness mask" to obscure faces, just like on TV. Uptown stuff! Rob's mention of a blur is good, it works well on the witness mask idea very well, but I have used the hard-edged ellipse for a highlighed area because I wanted to define it clearly (such as to show a fleeing perp from a robbery, in one case. NOT the example shown, this was a random clip I happend to have!) /BV

[Rob Johnson]

Absolutely BV. Years ago I used to use the mosaic effect as you were saying, described above in AE. It seems that on popular television it has fallen mostly out of favor for a simple blurring effect, yet still very doable. - Incidentally, I wasn't referring to blurring the subject in the oval, only adding a blur filter to the matte .. blurring the edges of the oval since the Track Matte Key does not provide a feathering parameter (I think you got that thought).

This will all help me as well as Nelson since I always had to port footage into AE to add this effect. It will be a great time saver. Once again great idea.

[Battle Vaughan]

Yes, Rob, I understood what you meant; I think a hard-edge oval when you are trying to highlight a specific area makes it jump out, the soft-edge works a treat on the mosiac-witness mask as it looks kind of odd with a hard edge, and the blur helps cover if you mis-track the mosiac a tad...best wishes! /BV