Chromakey video

[Tom Hawbaker]

It would be really cool if there was a way to do chromakey video over the pano. I don't think this is possible...and I am having a hard time imagining how it could be done. Any thoughts? I think it would be way cool!

[phberlin]

Hi Tom,

the problem is the lack of alpha channel support in video formats. Thus, you cannot simply define a chroma key area as transparent and use the video inside FPP. But what you could do is:

1. Make a video, using a chroma key background (for example like here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPzv_IrK9qc&feature=related)).
2. Extract a rectilinear view from your pano at the very position where you want the video to be placed in the end. The view must be bigger than the video frame.
3. Crop your extracted rectilinear view to the video frames aspect ratio.
4. Replace the video's chroma key background with your extracted view in every frame of the video.
5. Insert the final composite video in FPP as distorted box object.

I'm not a video guy, so there might be better/easier solutions, but you can do step 4 directly in Photoshop CS4 Extended (maybe in CS3 Ext. already) and render the changed video.

Good luck!
Philipp