Need some help on how to make an effect on vegas 4.0

[Jorge]

Hey guys
I need some help. I have a small clip of a movie my friends and I did; and what I want to do is basically remove the backround of the video, and just have my friend and nothing else. The reason is that I want to put a different backround behind him. Any suggestions.

Oh, I also want to make a movie as if my friend was a ghost. How can I just lower the opacity on my friend so he lookes like if he was faded away.
Your help is well appreciated.

[housepig]

what's in the background now?

[edDV]

The way to do it in the future is shoot your friends against a bright flat lit green screen.

Google chroma key.

[daamon]

Hi Jorge,

If you don't have a single colour background (as per edDV's post), you're gonna have a very difficult if not impossible time getting your friend isolated from it.

You need to read up on chromae keys and mattes, then learn what Vegas 4 can do and uderstand how it does it, and only then shoot your footage according to the needs of the app.

I don't know Vegas 4, but I'll base the following on my knowledge and experience of Premiere 6.0...

As for making your friend look like a ghost, a simple way would be to put the footage of him into another (higher) video track and adjust the opacity with the Vegas equivalent of "rubber bands" (the red line in the picture below).

Look in the Vegas 4 help files for opacity - there must be something in there...



Hope that points you in the right direction... Good luck.

[Jorge]

ok, will do. I'll tell you how it goes.