The PTE Cloak Of Invisibility Video

[Lin Evans]

I had to laugh recently because a video was circulating on the web about a Chinese Physicist who had invented a cloak of invisibility. It was a nice little video which had fooled many halfway intelligent people - too many in fact. I then created the little slide of my plastic sheet which I pulled over a cougar and made her invisible then promised maybe a little video demo. Today I was rather tired - I mowed my front yard, edged and swept it and felt like disappearing - getting old I guess. So I decided to have a tiny bit of fun and made this little video so I could disappear in my front yard. For a fun project, it's a really simple thing to do with PicturesToExe. The things needed are a still camera (which can take video's), a tripod and a plain green sheet. Find a nice background (something much nicer than my front yard) and set the camera on a tripod and focus and zoom as desired. Shoot a still image then turn on your video and walk into the frame with your green sheet. Maybe it would be a fun thing for your kids or grand kids - make them disappear? They love this kind of thing. Just take your video and your still image into PTE and if you can't shoot the video and still at the same aspect ratio, you'll need to trim/crop/size to make them identical. Load the still then go to Objects and Animations and load the video. Use the mini viewer or pull the keyframe to get a good frame of your green sheet with the video selected and on the Properties Tab, click on the Chroma Key and use  the eyedropper to select your green sheet. Adjust the value a bit higher than the default of five (I used 12). Add a leading blank slide and perhaps a trailing blank for comments - mute the sound on the video and put in your own audio comments or if the sound on the video is good, leave it. That's all there is to it folks!  Happy invisibility Playing...

Lin

NOTE: If your video from your camera doesn't function in Version 9, try it in Version 8 and convert it. The conversion will work in Version 9 most every time. I've noticed my videos from my Nikon P900 which are a mov format are sometimes not recognized by Version 9 but play fine in Version 8. In my own camera (Nikon P900) I have to set the still image to zoom to 120 to match the video capture. The camera apparently does an internal zoom out without changing the actual physical position of the lens zoom. You can set the opacity on PTE to completely adjust the video and still image so that they perfectly coincide if necessary... To avoid all this, you CAN simply take two identical videos - one of simply the background and one of the object, person, pet, etc., to become invisible. Then use the two videos as you would the still image and video... either way works fine. It's best if your background doesn't contain lots of green like mine - easier to key out the green without interference. Also when using two videos, the keying must be done on the "top" video in O&A where when using a still image the video will be on the bottom rather than the top layer.

 

 

[nelson]

Thanks Lin, very enjoyable and enlightening.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Nelson,

Really good green screen results requires a more dedicated Video editor than PTE. The Chroma Key capabilities are not terribly sophisticated. By using a tool like Adobe After Effects it's possible to completely eliminate the sight green halo around objects including the green plastic or cloth used for the effect. Unfortunately in PTE we don't have that level of control yet - perhaps in PTE 10, but the important thing to me is that it "can" be done and it's fun to play with. It's best if the background is other than mostly green. I didn't have a good place for a quick sample so used my yard which is far from ideal. Having all that extra green tends to complicate things. 

Actually, PTE can use any color for the key so when doing this exercise with lots of green in the picture, wear clothes with zero red and use a red cloth for the chroma key extraction sheet. I'll try to make another using red and post it later.

Best regards,

Lin