Well, I finally have started to gain a little momentum toward doing something with video production. Today, I went to Home Depot and bought some green paint and I came back home and painted up a piece of cardboard. This was a big piece of cardboard, left over from another production that never got off the ground. It was a piece of the ceiling from the set, which was the bridge of a space ship (see my Double Space pages for more info).

Now this piece of cardboard is a big green panel that I can hopefully use as a "green screen" for some chroma key effects.


As you can see, I set it up in my living room to give it a try. But I was not having too much luck with it. I need to work on the placement and lighting (you can see two work lamps in the photo that I also bought at Home Depot today). As it turns out, the green screen may be too small and I may need a better solution.

The universe seems to be leading me to do video these days. A friend of mine has started sending me little video clips that he has put together, using a simple luminance key feature that is built into his camera. Here is a sample of some of the clips he has sent to me (you'll need Windows Media Player to view them):

The Dolphin
The Giraffe
The Big Drink

I laughed pretty hard at that last one. I think he made himself laugh, but he used it and it worked.

Anyway, here is one other one he sent to me. This was the motivation for me to do something in return, and also the motivation for me to get set up to do chroma key.
Where is Spongebob?
I wanted to use chroma key to put myself into the video, as if Patrick was asking me if I had seen Spongebob.

My adventure began some time ago, actually, when I bought Pinnacle Studio Deluxe 7 from someone locally, which is a digital video editing system that comes with a video I/O card and software. I had it sitting around for some time, and it was originally going to go into the computer that I was building that kicked off this whole Computer Circus blog (if you go to my first entries, you'll get all the gory details).

Instead, it wound up going into my new shop computer, Borg, because that is where I spend all my time. It is a slower computer, but it works. I began the installation, hoping it would not lead to another [negative] Computer Circus entry, and guess what? The installation went without a hitch! I think the universe is trying to tell me something.

Anyway, I quickly learned how to use the software and have already grown to dislike it, but at least I am able to do some stuff now. It is very limited for what I want to do, and the controls are not intuitive to me. I was rather surprised, considering that I have heard a lot of good things about how easy this software is to use.

I have version 8 of the software, but I have not yet installed it. That is the next thing on my list of things to do. I did a little research and discovered the hardware for version 8 is identical to version 7, but I don't know if the version 8 that I have is the Deluxe version (or even if there is a Deluxe version for version 8).

Regardless, I have used version 7 to produce my first very short video, based on the Patrick/Spongebob video that my friend sent to me.
Again, here is the original he sent to me:
Where is Spongebob?
And here is the version I have created from that:
Are You Asking Me?

The idea was to use this as the background video for my chroma key setup. I shot many, many takes of myself interacting with Patrick (and the camera), but nothing quite worked out. I simply could not get the conditions right that I needed in order to perform a successful key effect.

The biggest problem that I had was that Pinnacle 7 does not appear to have any key effects. It also does not have any way to select a segment of video and reverse it, but that's another issue (I had to reverse some portions of the original video, one frame at a time, to create the motion loops to extend the length of the original footage). I looked around online to see if there were any tools available that would do it, but there was nothing. Nothing affordable, anyway.

However, I had a hardware solution that has been sitting in the closet for years. It is a Videonics MX-1 Digital Video Mixer:


I dug it out of the closet and hooked it up. I played around with it for a while and determined that my source footage was crap. The key effects looked terrible...but only because I did not have the proper lighting. I also determined it would be quite difficult to try to perform the edit live, since I would not have the luxury of having both source videos in the computer to work with non-linearly - it would all have to take place in one take. And this meant having two video sources and one target, and I just don't have the equipment to make that happen.

So now I am looking for digital tools. I downloaded the trial version of Adobe Premiere, but I haven't dug very deep into it, yet. So far, I really like it. And it is weird, because another guy I know was supposed to send me some software to try out a long time ago, but I hadn't heard from him in a long time. Out of the clear blue, he called me today and asked me what software I wanted him to send to me. Weird. I tell you, the universe is telling me something.

Anyway, I was not able to get a good clean key effect, but here is an example that I was able to put together from a still shot.

Here is the key shot I took with my digital camera:


And here is the same shot with the Patrick background blended in:


As you can see, there are many artifacts around the edges that are characteristic of improper lighting. There is quite a bit of green light reflecting onto my body, so the edges are not crisp. I need a fill light to wash the green off my back.

So, I have my work cut out for me if I want to get this working right. My first step is to secure some decent DV editing tools. I'll have to see what I can afford. I do want to get the chroma key working, but I think I will need to construct something out of some kind of cloth or cloth-like material so I can make it large, but still transportable (i.e. something that breaks down into a manageable size). I'm also going to install Pinnacle version 8 to see if I like it any better, though I'm not real happy about being limited to the fixed tracks that it provides. But at least it is SOMETHING! After all this time, I am finally able to get video into my computer. HAHA! And I'm not even using the computer that I built for this purpose! But I think I am reserving that computer until I know what software I want to clutter it up with.

But Borg is filling up fast. It already has assimilated too much.

Well, it's nice to have a positive entry in the Computer Circus blog for a change. Nothing drastic happened. Another friend of mine sent me a couple of BSOD screen shots, so now I am equipped with some samples to use in the video I want to make about a guy who is driven insane by his computer.

That will be fun!