Wow!  Am I excited!

I just discovered one of the greatest resources for video producers I could ever imagine.

FREE stock footage.   Yup, FREE.

As an independent video producer, having access to quality footage is essential.  I can not edit together a great video without great raw materials.   I love to shoot video myself but simply do not have the time or resources to go shoot everything I need all by my lonesome.

So, I often rely on stock footage.  Problem is, that gets expensive and most stock footage agencies have limited licensing.  That means I can not turn around and sell whatever video I have edited.  Bummer.

What to do?

Well, at first I thought working 36 hours a day was the answer.  I'll get out there and shoot all that footage myself even if it kills me!  No doubt it would have too.

A much better answer appeared to me this morning.

StockFootageForFree.com offers lots of great footage.  The price is unbeatable and the licensing is looser so I can sell what I edit.  The only restriction is that I can not turn around and sell it as stock footage, which I would never do anyway.   I use the stock footage within a larger video production.

I could NOT believe what I was seeing so I picked up the phone and called their toll free number.

"OK, what's the catch?"  Ms. Skeptic here asked.

"No catch," the gentleman said.   Turns out, stock footage for free dot com is a spin off effort for a much larger stock footage company, Footage Firm.  Footage Firm has been around for about seven years and they sell stock footage to the big boys, TV networks and the like.

With the rise of online video creating more and more independent video producers, Footage Firm saw that a need.  Most independent video producers don't have the budget of a TV network.  (Wow, is that ever an understatement!)

So they decided to offer a sizeable amount of stock for free; not just to be magnanimous but in order to build a base of customers who just might eventually be able to purchase some stock.

The gamble paid off and the website they started in March, stock footage for free.com now has 35,000 registered users.  Footage Firm has seen both increased traffic to their main site and more sales.

So this is a win-win-win.

The library at stockfootageforfree.com is not humongous, but it is sizable.  And the quality of the video is fantastic!

All you have to do is register, download, and go edit!

You can order larger quantities of footage on DVD; all you have to pay is shipping and handling.   Is that great, or what?  Thousands of dollars worth of stock footage for the price of mailing.

I don't know about you, but I see lots of editing in my future using the free footage off stockfootageforfree.com

Go check it out!

Thanks for being a subscriber

Lorraine Grula

Internet Video Gal

Technorati Tags: Footage Firm, Internet Video Gal, online video creating, stock footage, video producers, video production

ARE YOU STUMPED BY VIDEO EDITING?

Editing video on a computer is fun and easy once you know how. But if you are new to video editing, it can seem terribly confusing.

The on-screen interface in a computer editing program has multiple windows that all function independently of each other, yet work together to help you complete the video editing process.

No other software genre packs as much on to the screen as video editing software.

What do you do with it all? Watch this free video editing tutorial and discover how video editing works.

For [more info]

If you are going to upload your own personal video's try out our free service for a month…

Technorati Tags: Editing video, software genre, video, video editing software

Using chroma key, you can make virtually ANYTHING happen in your digital video.

Want your video to take place on the other side of the universe? Chroma key is the video editing technique that can take you there in seconds, for nothing.

Chroma key is commonly called green screen. Most people are familiar with the term green screen. That's where your on-camera talent stands in front of a bright lime green background. Then, through editing, all the lime green is removed from the shot and another image is inserted in its place.

Green screen is the common term, but technically, chroma key is more accurate. Chroma key can use any color, not just green. All it takes is the right equipment to handle the different colors. That flexibility can make life much easier.

In the recent internet viral video I made poking fun of the presidential election, I used chroma key for several things.

Make the alien character, Fonda Lots-a-Titty
Blow up the inflatable Barbie doll
Have the bank robber trample John McCain.

(Have you seen this video? It's really impossible to explain. You just gotta SEE IT.)

Here's how chroma key helped me make that video.

First, to make the alien character, I made some "eyeballs" out of tennis balls, wire, paper and pipe cleaners. It was much like a kindergarten art project!

We video taped the eyeballs bouncing on the wire in front of a red cloth background. I shot the left eyeball and the right separately, so I could get as close as possible and fill up the frame. This helps your final chroma key effect look best. Then we yanked out the eyelashes out and shot it a third time as a nose.

In order to make your final chroma key effect look right, you have to shoot it with VERY BRIGHT, DIFFUSED LIGHT. You do not want shadows when shooting something for chroma key. Shadows in the back ground alter the color of your background by making it darker or lighter in spots. To do an effective chroma key, you have to have a VERY CONSISTENT COLOR for your background. Remember, this is the color that will be digitally removed. Any slight variations in the color will affect how well you can remove it and replace it with another image.

I used red as a chroma key background for the eyeballs and nose because the tennis balls were a greenish-yellow color. To get a better chroma key, I needed to use a color opposite of the color of the tennis balls. Lime green is most often used for chroma key effect because it is opposite on the color spectrum from facial tones. Because it is opposite, the digital removal of one color won't affect the other. This would be why you never see a weathercaster wearing a lime green dress.

I used a red background for the Barbie doll shot too because Barbie was wearing a green dress. That ended up being a mistake.

When I got my video shots in the video editing software, (I use Final Cut on a Mac Pro) I put the jpeg of the alien's head and torso on line one of my timeline. I put the right eye, left eye and the nose shots on lines two, three and four. Each shot is separate because that gives me more control over placement, size and other details.

I applied the color key filter to each eyeball and the nose shot. The filter is not needed on the jpeg of the alien.

The color key filter in Final Cut lets you do chroma key using any color. So I matched the color to the red background I'd taped. I then played with details of the filter, including the tolerance level, the edge thickness and the edge softness. By adjusting these levels individually I got the chroma key effect to look as good as possible. Sometimes it wasn't necessarily very good, but with the eyeballs, I made that work to my advantage.

Like I said earlier, in order to get all the background color out, you have to shoot it with very bright diffused light and get a shadow less shot. I'm not able to do that very well because I have real limited lighting equipment. Plus, the best red background I could scrounge up was a crinkled red dress. (I work with what I have; this is low budget video folks. No Hollywood expense accounts here.)

I scotch taped the dress to the wall in order to get some of the wrinkles out, but that only helped a little. Combine that with my bad lighting and the red background was not very even so it was hard to get out. Plus, the eyelashes and the wire were both skinny to begin with. Large objects chroma key more easily.

In order to turn bad video into art, I put the edge thickness and edge softness of the chroma key filter up high. This gave the eyeballs and eyelashes a soft red glow. I thought it looked cool.

On the shot of the Barbie doll though, the problems were so bad that I abandoned the use of chroma key filter There was no way I could get the red out without taking lots of Barbie's face with it. Her arms really disappeared badly too. So did the letter opener we used to prick her in the tush. So, enter Plan B.

I just cut out the majority of the red background using a matt instead. That basically crops it out and is a completely different effect from chroma key.

I let Barbie have a huge red background and just didn't worry about it.

A matt is also how I added the lips. That was not chroma key, just the nose and eyeballs were. I shot the lips close up and then cut out as much as possible using an 8-point garbage matt. That lets me set 8 different points where the shot gets cropped. Then I added the shot of the lips onto the top line of the timeline in order to complete the face.

In addition to doing a red chroma key for this video, I also used a white chroma key. Look at the opening with the space ship. The spaceship was a jpeg on a white background. I chroma keyed it over a star background I generated in Live Type. (Life Type is a program that comes bundled with Final Cut and you can do easy title animation and backgrounds.) Most of the white disappeared easily, but I left a faint white soft glow around the edges because I liked it.

The bank robber was also a jpeg and his background was beige. So I used the chroma key filter and set the color to beige. Then I key framed the bank robber to run over a shot of John McCain.

So, there you have it. How chroma key technique helped me make my goofy internet viral video.

The Internet Video Gal

Lorraine Grula

Technorati Tags: bank robber, digital video, Internet Video Gal, John McCain, jpeg, Lorraine Grula, real limited lighting equipment, recent internet viral video, tennis, video editing software

Virtually any aspect of your video that can be altered during editing can be key framed. It's a way to achieve 2-Dimensional movements and changes to your video. You can key frame changes in filters too.

As simple as it is to do, key framing is considered an advanced technique. You need a fairly sophisticated program in order to do it. Not all video editing software will let you do key framing.

Once you get some practice with key framing, you will wonder how you ever got along without it. I use key framing all the time, much more often than wipes and other transitions.

To learn more about key frame animation, watch this free demonstration video.
It is only 3 minutes long and will help you become an advanced video editor.

Thanks for being a subscriber

Lorraine Grula

Technorati Tags: ANIMATION, Lorraine Grula, video editing software

Green Screen is a nick name; the technique is actually called CHROMA KEY. Chroma means color. In video, to "key" is to put two separate images together. So chroma key literally means to replace any one color in your image with a different image.

In other words, you take your subject and video them in front of a lime green background. Then, you can take out the lime green background and replace it with anything you want, a picture of Mars for example. This makes it look as if your subject was originally photographed with Mars in the background.

You see green screen on TV all the time. The most common example of green screen is the weather report. The weather-guesser stands in front of a lime green background and the different weather maps are chroma-keyed in behind him. This way, the weather-guesser looks like he is in front of a US map one second and a local map the next second. In reality, he is in front of neither; they are merely video images chroma-keyed in.

WHY USE GREEN?

Green is commonly used because it is the exact OPPOSITE color of skin tone. Then, when you remove the green, you will not remove any face along with it. Using a color opposite of skin tone gets you the best results; on a technical level, any color can be used.

If you want to green screen a little green Martian, you might want to actually do a brown screen instead.

Lime green and bright turquoise blue have been shown to function best when you are chroma-keying skin tones.

WHAT EQUIPMENT DO I NEED?

In order to do color-key, you have to have the right equipment. Generally, this would be a sophisticated video editing software program, like Final Cut. Simple, basic editing programs like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie do NOT allow you to color key.

You can also color key using a video switcher if you have a video studio.

To see a demonstration of me doing a green screen for the Stephen Colbert Show, watch this free video editing tutorial.

Green screen is very easy if you have the proper tools.

So when I saw the other day that he was having another green screen challenge, I knew I had to take it!

At www.ColbertNation.com, Comedy Central posted a video of John McCain giving a speech in front of a green background that you could chroma key away.  So I downloaded it, drug it into Final Cut and let the video editing software do it's magic.

Personally, I was rather pleased with the final video and am anxiously waiting to see if it gets selected for the Stephen Colbert show.

Watch the show and keep your fingers crossed for me.

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In the days ahead, I will produce some videos showing how I did the green screen effect and how I used key frame animation to send Mr. McCain swirling into oblivion.

Stay tuned!

Lorraine Grula
Internet Video Gal