Special effect for Wedding Video

I just finished shooting my daughter's wedding video and I am about to edit it using Final Cut Express 2. Up to now, all of my editing experience has been with imovie and this will be my first time using Final Cut Express. The effect that I want to achieve is as follows: The groom will be sitting on one side of the bench and the bride on the other side of the bench. They are looking away from each other and they slowly turn to look at each other. I want their physical bodies to stay seated on the bench but as they stand up and walk toward each other and embrace, I want their bodies to be transparent to look like spirits. Can someone help me accomplish this special effect keeping in mind that this will be my first editing experience using Final Cut Express

Thanks, Bill

under the motion tab. adjust the opacity value of the overlaying clip - very easy. you can set keyframes and have the clip go from totally transparent, to slightly ghost like over time.

in your manual, look up topics like opacity and keyframes and it will explain it in further detail.

if not, drop back by and we can explain

Thanks for the quick reply Wayne. If I have problems with it I will let you know

Bill

please do! we'll be here

> I want their physical bodies to stay seated on the bench but as they stand up and walk
> toward each other and embrace, I want their bodies to be transparent to look like spirits.

A couple of other things you may wish to explore:

The bride's wearing white, so you may want to jack up the Highs using Color Corrector. When superimposing images, usually the highlights blast through while the shadows get lost. The top layer should probably have its highlights increased and the blacks dipped.

Experiment with Composite modes. Add, Screen and Overlay tend to give good results for superimposition.

Also play with the Luma Key filter. This will allow you to make either the highlights or the shadows disappear off the top layer.


www.derekmok.com

I apologize for being slow today, but I'm trying to do this exact same effect for a music video -- a girl is sitting on a chair and her spirit gets up and walks away. NONE of the composite modes look right (sometimes you see things on the wall through her head, which I don't understand), and simply changing the opacity of the top moving layer doubles her chair (if you see what I mean), so it looks like TWO ghosts on the screen rather than one. Does that make sense? What am I missing? I've pored over my FCP books and can't see a solution, but maybe I don't know where to look. I assumed that it would be either compositing or opacity. So Bill, did you get it to work so that one couple looks solid and one looks ghosty and the background looks normal? Can you explain how, or guide me in the right direction online or in a manual?

Videowallah:

I haven't tried to do the effect yet. I am still trying to learn how to use FCE. It will be a few weeks before I am ready to make the video. If you solve your problem, please let me know how you did it.

ok, we may have oversimplified things. the only EASY way to pull this off well is if both of the following are true:
- both shots were done on the same exact tripod lockdown.
- shots were either done indoor under controlled light or if shot under daylight, IMMEDIATELY after each other.

if you shot it off the shoulder or at different times of day, its never going to look quite right without some serious masking, and color correcting.

providing the first two qualifications are satisfied, you simply do an opacity ramp from 0% up to say 40% on the "ghost" clip. the composite modes may or may not help, depending on whats in your shot or how you want it to look.

Its OK if the camera shakes a little bit. Just track it in Shake or AE and then simply matchmove the footage.

Johan Polhem
Motion Graphics
www.johanpolhem.com

I dunno if someone who is learning FCE has the resources to do a spot of motion tracking in AE or Shake, really.

Here's a step by step that should work if your shots are locked off.

Put the shot of the couple sitting opposite eachother on V1. Then put the shot of the couple walking to eachother above this clip, on V2. Click on the small 'Toggle clip overlays' button at the bottom left of your timeline. It looks like little mountain. This will give you opacity controls on the clips.

Now on the V2 clip, grab the black line at the top of the clip (you can barely see it,it's right at the top of the clip on the timeline) and drag it downwards until you get to about 30% (or whatever best suits your footage),

If you timing is good, the ghost couple should rise and walk away from their bodies.

You could also freeze the sitting couple if you wanted, to give more life to the ghosts.

Oh yeah, and as Wayne said, you can ramp the opacity up from 0 so that the effect comes in gradually, rather than suddenly.

come on johan, do you think someone whos just getting their heads around FCE is goning to have shake or after effects?

thats like someone asking how to turn on image stabilzation then telling them to go get their steadicam...

> simply changing the opacity of the top moving layer doubles her chair

That means your two "plates" don't match, and the effect isn't going to look very good. Aside from using opacity and composite modes, also use a Color Corrector filter on the top layer, the "ghost" layer you are trying to superimpose on the basic shot. Use Color Corrector to heighten the highlights and deepen the shadows -- unless your subject is wearing black or another very dark colour. That will help the top layer come through better. Also, you may want to apply some motion keyframes so the two images don't overlap too much, which would jumble the double-image effect.


www.derekmok.com

OK, my brain hurts. I THINK my "plates" match (we didn't move the camera at all) it's just that obviously in V2 she's not sitting in the chair, so you have a ghost chair on top of the V1 girl who's sitting on the chair. I tried cropping V2 away from the chair, and then obviously that led to massive color problems. I'm obviously missing some big clue here.

I wish I had some comparable footage on my system to check this out, but I'll have to use my imagination here . . .

What you might need to do is mask out the top ("ghosted" layer except for the path of the subject walking off screen. Then keyframe the mask to cover the chair as the subject walks away from the chair, to eliminate the ghost chair over the non-ghost subject on the bottom layer. This looks good in my head, but then a lot of things look much better up there than in reality. Feel free to tell me if I'm talking out of my hat.

Masking (as opposed to keyframed cropping) is something I haven't worked with too much, I don't thoroughly understand it and need to read up on it. Do you mean like an 8-pt garbage matte around the girl? Maybe I might have to wait until the actual music video shoot (this was a test shoot in the office to see if the effect worked and I could manage it) and see how the color and background is before I start having a nervous breakdown. The only potential problem I see with what you're saying is the color one again, that when all the color is doubled and then you mask the girl, wouldn't you clearly see the mask outline? Would you just have to fade and color-correct her to death? Argh. I'll leave it for a couple weeks.

If you feather your mask it might look like ghostly wafting outlines.. it depends on the brightness difference of your footage. Maybe increasing the brightness of the overlay would work well too.

It's very hard to say without the actual footage and the time to mess with it. Should be acheivable, in theory.