Conan O'Brien mouth cutout interviews - help?

[menoseficaz]

Hey all,

Trying to do a skit for an upcoming event and I want to do some "interviews" with people with their mouth cut out. I'd like to do it real-time (not pre-recorded, then edited afterwards), like Conan does:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py7haZKDOPA

Any thoughts on what kind of software I could use for that? There are some webcam programs that kind of come close, but they won't let me do full-screen. I have Premiere CS5 and After Effects.

Thanks in advance!!!

[lordsmurf]

Easy.
Watch this tutorial video: Conan O'Brian 'Lips' Video Editing Tutorial for Premiere
It's not hard.

[menoseficaz]

That's the right general idea, but I want to do it real-time, not recorded, then copied over. We want to be able to do it in a live interview setting, so Premiere doesn't seem to fit the bill for that.

[lordsmurf]

You'll have to have an expensive online video editing setup like a broadcaster does.
There's no way to do it live with software.

It's either how I suggested, or not at all.

[aedipuss]

That's the right general idea, but I want to do it real-time, not recorded, then copied over. We want to be able to do it in a live interview setting, so Premiere doesn't seem to fit the bill for that.

wtf? you are simple enough to think that conan crap is actually live.? who was it that said "there's a sucker born every minute", guess they were right

[AlanHK]

That's the right general idea, but I want to do it real-time, not recorded, then copied over. We want to be able to do it in a live interview setting, so Premiere doesn't seem to fit the bill for that.

wtf? you are simple enough to think that conan crap is actually live.? who was it that said "there's a sucker born every minute", guess they were right

Looking at the Youtube clip it's pretty clear it is live. He'd have to be very, very good to keep his replies so perfectly in sync with a recording.

The effect is pretty trivial. The face background is static, masking in the mouth from a live feed.

No idea what software/hardware they use for this though. Probably related to he green screening they use for weather segments, etc.

[Noahtuck]

Looking at the Youtube clip it's pretty clear it is live. He'd have to be very, very good to keep his replies so perfectly in sync with a recording.

Yeah, and The terminator movies are also "live"!!

And so is Tosh.0!!!

LOL!!!

There is a difference between being broadcast live and being recorded live....
Recorded live can still be staged and edited.....

[AlanHK]

Looking at the Youtube clip it's pretty clear it is live. He'd have to be very, very good to keep his replies so perfectly in sync with a recording.

Yeah, and The terminator movies are also "live"!!

And so is Tosh.0!!!

LOL!!!

There is a difference between being broadcast live and being recorded live....
Recorded live can still be staged and edited.....

I have no idea what point you think you are making.

But to clarify my post: it looks live, as in the guy doing the mouthing is actually speaking live to Conan.

And technically, it looks no harder than effects used in (live) news broadcasts. And less convincing; though it's probably deliberately amateurish.

And of course it was scripted; but parts at least looked ad lib.

It could have been recorded; that would actually have been harder and taken much longer.

[videopoo]

Yeah, and The terminator movies are also "live"!!

And so is Tosh.0!!!

LOL!!!

There is a difference between being broadcast live and being recorded live....
Recorded live can still be staged and edited.....

I worked on the show when it was at NBC in LA and I can tell you it is done live in front of an audience only once.....everytime. That portion of the show was never edited even though the show itself was not broadcast live

In fact it was done with a Ross Video Vision 4 Switcher to be exact

[jagabo]

It's a simple overlay. You could do it with AviSynth's Overlay(), a static image, an alpha mask, and the right capture card.

[Gavino]

You also have to make the mouth move in sync with the audio.
Someone did this kind of thing (fairly crudely) with Avisynth a couple of years ago:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=141993

[AlanHK]

You also have to make the mouth move in sync with the audio.

No animation in these Conan ones. It's just a live video feed of person talking, cropped down to their mouth, superimposed on a still of the celeb's face.

[lordsmurf]

Ross Video Vision 4 Switcher

Yep, about what I figured. My thoughts immediately turned to Grass Valley gear.
Online/linear editing suites, hardware.

Not software.

I do, however, think some of those were pre-records -- at least years ago when I watched.
I've not watched Conan in a long, long time.

[edong]

An apology to the OP is in order.

[lordsmurf]

An apology to the OP is in order.

For what?

[jagabo]

I was able to put together an AviSynth script that takes live video from a webcam and overlays it onto a picture of a face with an alpha mask over the mask.

vid=DirectShowSource("cap.grf", audio=false, fps=30, seek=false, framecount=100000).ConvertToYV12()
pic=ImageSource("conan.png", fps=30, start=0, end=100000).ConvertToYV12()
mask=ImageSource("mask.png", fps=30, start=0, end=100000).ConvertToYV12()
Overlay(pic, vid, 150, 208, mask)

cap.grf is a capture graph to get video from the camcorder, made with GraphStudio.

The lighting was bad (my office) and I'm much scruffier than Conan, but here's a screen cap from the live video:



Obviously, for this to work the speaker has to stay in exactly the right spot.