Use Adobe After Effects to create eye-catching colorized video effects.
Kennedy Grey
BEFORE THE DAWN of digital-video editing, creating simple special effects such as highlighting an object required good camera and lighting work during filming as well as tedious film processing. Now effects can be created in the digital realm, without the time and expense that film processing required.
Using software such as Adobe Premiere and After Effects or Strata MediaPaint, you can create an elegant digital-video effect that masks one object so that it remains in full color against black-and-white footage. Once you mask out the object, you can transform it in a variety of ways, including duplicating it or keying it over another background.
The color-on-black-and-white effect appears in a lot of commercials and music videos. It was also used by Francis Ford Coppola in Rumble Fish, a black-and-white film that had a tank of Siamese fighting fish highlighted in color for emphasis.
Creating this kind of effect on the Mac is a snap and can be accomplished by use of any of the software mentioned above. In this case, Reg Harris, of Seattle's Omniscient Productions, used Adobe After Effects on QuickTime footage of his dog, Jean-Luc, playing with a Frisbee.
Kennedy Grey is a contributing editor for AV Video magazine and is the director of digital media at Fast Forward Productions in Seattle, an organization dedicated to empowering at-risk youth by training them to use new media-production tools. You can reach him at Motive8@aol.com.
Step by Step
1. Setting up the composition. Open After Effects, and
create a new composition (Composition: New Composition). Set
your desired composition size -- in this case 640 x 480 pixels
-- and duration. Import the footage you'll use for the effect
into the Project window (Import: Footage File).
Drag your footage from the Project window into the
Composition window. The first frame of the clip will appear, and
a layer for the clip will be added in the Time Layout window.
2. Making the black-and-white lnayer. Desaturate the
layer, by adding Color Balance HLS effects (Effects: Image
Controls: Color Balance HLS). In the Effect Controls window,
slide the Saturation indicator to -100.0. In the Composition
window, the clip will desaturate, showing only the grayscale
information.
3. Making the mask layer. Again, drag your footage from
the Project window to the Composition window. A second layer
will be placed directly over the first and will block the
grayscale footage completely. This layer will be masked so that
only the color Frisbee shows.
To mask a moving image, you must create a mask shape. Each
frame must have a properly positioned shape to create a
convincing effect. Click on the small triangle next to the
film-footage name to reveal the Mask controls. Reveal the Mask
Shape controls in the same way. Click on the small clock icon
next to the Mask Shape track to enable variable keyframes.
Turning on variable keyframes tells After Effects to create a
keyframe and automatically add keyframes as the mask shape is
changed over time.
4. Creating a circular mask. Double-click on the top
layer -- the colored image -- to open the Layer Editing window.
Select the circular-mask tool from the tool palette, and drag
out a circle. This creates a circular mask area that, in our
example, shows only the pink center of the Frisbee.
5. Creating a Bezier mask. Advance to the next
frame, and adjust the mask position and shape. A mask created
with the circular-mask tool doesn't work well for the shape of
the Frisbee as the dog is moving. The Bezier tool is a
better choice for the irregular shape of the disk as it moves.
It allows the creation of a customized mask shape that can then
be manipulated with Bezier curves just like the ones you
create with the pen tool in Adobe Photoshop.
Repeat the process on each frame until the entire top layer
is properly masked. Finally, render a QuickTime movie
