Music Video Idea

[rustysterling]

You all know I shot my step-daughters recent concert. She performs a song called "I'm On Fire." The idea I got was to use her concert footage, shoot footage of a fire (probably in my fireplace) and then superimpose the fire footage over her concert footage. I use Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 and just want to know if this is feasible? How could I make her concert footage show through the flames?

[Wheat King]

Couple of ideas rusty,
-put the footage of the flames on the track above the concert footage and dial back the opacity of the flames so you can see through.

-You could also use a track matte to push the flames to the outside.

Cool idea for an effect, hopefully others will come up with some other ideas too!

[Chuck Engels]

I like the idea and Jamal is right about how to go about it. You could probably do some other things with After Effects but you should get a real nice look with Premiere Elements alone.

Have you ever seen any of Ed Mann's videos of Marshall Crenshaw?
http://www.chuckengels.com/PremierVideo ... dmann.html

Concert Intro Video and Conan Effect Video are pretty cool, maybe give you some ideas. He did everything with Premiere Elements version 1 I think.

[Paul LS]

I have used this effect and it works very well...

http://adobe.groupbrowser.com/searchthr ... ffect.html

[Chuck Engels]

Wow, great memory Paul, I completely forgot about those flame effects that Robert did

[Paul LS]

Or download some of the free Fire and explosions here that have been filmed against a green screen and use the chroma key effect to put your video behind them.

http://www.detonationfilms.com/free_stuff.htm

[Chuck Engels]

Wow Paul, you are full of great ideas

[rustysterling]

I kinda thought that dialing back the opacity of the flames would do the trick but I haven't experimented.

The stock footage with chroma key looks like a winner too. Thanks for all the help.

[Wheat King]

Or download some of the free Fire and explosions here that have been filmed against a green screen and use the chroma key effect to put your video behind them.

http://www.detonationfilms.com/free_stuff.htm

This would look really cool if you put the explosion in slow motion! Wow I have to find a way to sue this for one of my projects.

[rustysterling]

Well, I played around using the clip from the free download. I used what appeared to be the best clip for my needs. It starts with and explosive flare and then the fire settles down to flickering flame. After dragging the flames clip to the time line I copied and pasted a second clip and then trimmed the flareup. I then copied and pasted the trimmed clip several times to get about 3 minutes of fire. I rendered the clips and then exported the whole thing to an AVI file.

Then I edited down Gen's concert clip to just the song I had in mind and performed a save as of the project (so I didn't lose the entire concert project). Again, I rendered and exported to an AVI file.

I created yet another project and brought in the flames and Gen's clip. I put Gen's clip on Video/Audio 1 and the flame on 2. I turned down Gen's opacity a bit mostly to obscure the background. The flames opacity I set at about 20 and got just about the right affect. After rendering it only took about 10 minutes to burn a DVD. I also exported the project as an AVI for other purposes.

Right now I only consider the music video a concept. I want to reshoot the footage of Gen with a different background and she plans to wear a better outfit than she had on at the performance. But at least I got to play around with something to put together a concept video. I think it will be great once we have better footage of Gen.

BTW, the flames clip I picked didn't have any chroma key. It was strictly a black background. In fact, I noticed that a lot of the clips on the site weren't chroma keyed. But I can work with what I got (flames with black background). I'll check into what I need to do to load a clip to the website for you all to see the concept video.

Thanks for the help.

[Chuck Engels]

Rusty, with the black background you can chroma key the clip yourself in Premiere Elements and make the black background transparent.

Add the Choma Key effect to the clip. In the clip properties/chroma key you can use the eyedropper to select the Black background in the video. Then you can adjust the settings; Similarity, Blend, Threshold, Cutoff and Smoothing.

[rustysterling]

Thanks Chuck. Another thing I ran into was that the free flames clip was aspect 4:3 while Gen's footage was 16:9. But it wasn't a terrible problem. The result so far looks pretty good -- but it could be better.

[rustysterling]

OK. I've uploaded the concept video of "I'm On Fire" to the Gallery. Let me know what you think. I did this with a two camera shoot -- one fixed and me roaming with the other.