Few people makes a crowd
 

Hey everyone, i'm a new starting film maker and i have Final Cut Studio 2 and a HDR-FX7. I'm making a small film for my schools film festival and it has a small battle sequence in it. i have pretty much no budget so i'm trying to create the few people makes a crowd effect. I have my location which is a field that has dark dirt, i'm not exactly sure what i'm doing , but i would like to create something like the guys did in this short film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9cpOMYv0

Do i need to color key the image for the dirt and just keep the people, or chroma key, idk. After i do, i don't know how to get the actors by themselves after i separate the characters.

any help is appreciated

Thanks,

-D

"get the actors by themselves"? i'm not fully following...

I love that video, btw ... it blows my mind!

you know how on a green screen you can remove the background using a key and add any background that you want, i was wondering if thats what i need to do here where i remove the background on all but one of the different positions and use the one i didn't to create the background. and add them all together like they did in the video to create a sort of army.

it depends on the shot you want to do.
notice how they didn't move the camera on the wide shot of the beach with all the soldiers.
that is because it is a lot easier to composite things which have the exact same background.
you just choose an overlay method in your compositing program. whatever that may be - aftereffects would be ideal.
or you can use a series of loose masks.

thats what I wanted to do but is there anyway to create the composite with final cut studio 2?

I've never tried with FC, only AE. I know that you can change the transfer modes in FC (I believe you just right click the clip, then select "transfer mode" or "composite mode"), but I know I've seen a "4 point mask" effect, too. I've never even used that option though. Theoretically, it should work

You could use Motion but last time I tried its keying was pretty bad. This is After Effects territory.

even those transfer modes probably wont give you 100% opacity on what you are compositing.
Any time I've ever done anything like that i used masks in ae.

I would love to use after effects but I have no budget for this thing, is there anyplace that has after effects for less than $999?

any shot you're a student? gradware.com has it for like $350 if you can prove your enrollment ... that's quite a knock down

Ya i'm a sophomore at my high school. i checked the sight out great deals. will it export as a quicktime movie or do i need the adobe video software too?

you can export it to just about anything with ae these days.
I would advise you to get it if you can as theres a nice learning curve to it
but its well worth it. You can take it with you all the way to Hollywood!

I agree with Ger. AE used to scare the beJesus (what do I capitalize in that word?) out of me, as it's not like any other NLE's or anything I'd worked with. It's stinkin' amazing! Start now, and stick with it. It's amazing what you can do with it (i feel i should get some sort of cut from this). At least go to adobe.com and download the 30 day trial.

It also should be mandatory :-) that anyone who uses after effects, should visit this site!

www.videocopilot.net

I don't have anything to do with the site, but man, I wish I did! :-) The more people that visit, the more chance there is he'll do more free tutorials!

AE is daunting at first, but once it clicks with you, anything is possible!

You could get either Conduit or dvMattPro which are plugins for FinalCut Studio and either one is less expensive than the student price for AE:
http://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=conduit2
http://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=dvmattep3

I'm never one to discourage people from buying dvmatte :) but I don't think they used very much greenscreen in that video. For those wide beach shots, the greenscreen would have had to have been far too big. So they probably used the inherent contrast of the soldiers (dark) against the beach (light) to create simple mattes for the soldiers. Since the background is relatively static and the figures are so small, it works fine. It wouldn't work if the background was more complex (for example, a city street), or if the figures were larger in the frame (you'd see holes, and wind up rotoscoping them).

To replicate this on dark dirt, you'd want your actors to have very bright clothing. :) Which may not work out so well for a battle scene. But it would be worth a try!

The other approach would be to divide the screen into 4 or 5 sections from left to right, and have your soldiers act out the scene within those divisions. Then all you'd have to do would be to make a rough box around the action in each of the clips, and layer them together. That would at least get you 4 or 5 times the number of actors you have, and you wouldn't have to do any complex extractions...