Vid commentary: spot color effect in Skin
This isn't a full commentary on the vid -- this is just a description of how the spot colorization effect (Vesper's red dress in the ending sequence, roughly 3:07-3:16) was achieved in After Effects.
The vid: Skin (James Bond/Casino Royale)
For reference, I'm using After Effects 6.5 Professional. And an obvious note here is that this is how *I* happened to obtain this particular result...I'm not claiming it's the only (or even the best) way ;)
The first step was to get a rough idea of whether or not the effect would be worth the work, which I did by using the Color Pass effect in Premiere. Color Pass is pretty simple: there's a color picker with which you select the color that will be "passed" (i.e., it will be left behind in your clip and all other colors desaturated) and a slider to set how much similarity to the selected color you want to include. This was sufficient for me to get a notion of how the effect would look and to decide that yes, I liked it. Next, I laid out that section very carefully in Premiere before taking it into AE. I wasn't sure exactly how I'd do the spot color, but I figured it would be a pain in the ass and I didn't want to bother working on even a single frame that I wasn't ultimately going to use. Laziness = efficiency!
There's an effect in AE called Leave Color that is similar to Premiere's Color Pass but (as per usual with AE) more precise, with more adjustable parameters. That's what I started with.
The Leave Color effect panel. Experiment with all of the parameters, and don't forget the "Match colors" pulldown -- the "Using Hue" setting worked best for most of my clips, but there was one shot of Vesper underwater (at 3:16) for which the "Using RGB" option (which I know, you can't see it in the image...but it's there, *hee*) was vastly better. It was good enough, in fact, that nothing further was required on that particular shot.
If you've fiddled with color keying, then you know that it only works perfectly if your focus color is unique in the source...and here (with the exception of that aforementioned underwater shot) it was not. The shots below are a sampling of problematic frames with just Leave Color applied.
Leave Color is fairly effective here, but you can see that her left arm, handbag straps and Bond's back/ear (yum/yum! sorry, can't help it) retain some unwanted color.
And this is obviously the clearest example of how Leave Color on its own wasn't going to be enough. It's an interesting look, but not what I was shooting for!
So, as you can see above, I could get the dress red with Leave Color, but then other bits of color were also left behind in most frames. My solution was to mask out the non-Vesper parts of each frame, and have an identical layer underneath that was entirely black and white. That would knock out the annoying artifacts. I should note that I hate doing animated masking (and they couldn't be static masks because Vesper is moving in every clip)...really tedious. This wasn't the worst case scenario, though, as the masks could usually get away with loosely following her form and didn't need a bazillion vertex points/keyframes (except when there was something close to or touching her dress that was picking up color, like, say, her fucking arms...but really, not that bad overall).
This is the result on that particularly bad frame above, now with masking. It's not perfect at all (let's not talk about that bag on her shoulder, which has loads of red in it...I debated trying to mask it out of every frame because all I really wanted to hit was her dress, but it's touching her and that would have made the masking much more complicated, so I ended up leaving it mostly red...though you can see it's kinda messy around the left edge in this shot), but I was shooting for a generally good-looking spot color effect versus flawlessness in every still frame.
And other than getting rid of the unwanted artifacts of Leave Color, there was another point to masking, though it's rather nitpicky and not really relevant to the basic idea of creating this effect (so you're safe to stop reading now if you're at all bored): in most cases, I was using a specific Magic Bullet filter in combination with a Levels adjustment to create "black and white" in this vid. Using Leave Color (or Color Pass) on its own created quite a different, darker black and white look. I know, it's stupid, right? But not all black and white looks are created equal, OK? Anyway, by using two layers (and remember, the top layer is mostly masked out and then I feathered the edges of the mask to blend), I could apply the same Levels/B&W filter combo to the bottom layer and achieve the customized black and white look that's used for most of the vid. This is easier to show than to explain.
Here's that first shot again, using only Leave Color. Note the tones of the black and white areas.
Here's the same frame, now masked out around Vesper to reveal the layer underneath, with the customized black and white look (higher white level, more contrast, bit more grainy which I think is in keeping with the B&W opening sequence from the film). Yeah, it's not a huge deal, but since I needed to do the masking anyway, I was glad to be able to maintain consistency with other parts of the vid where I used that same filter combo.
The spot color effect was the main use of AE for this vid. I also used it on the very first clip (totally mental on that one: Bond was talking in the background and nobody would have noticed because he's tiny and there's a lot of motion in the clip AND DID I MENTION: TINY, but I masked out his moving mouth, WTF); then at 0:32-0:33 to tweak the transition between the Miami traffic and Bond sitting in the cab (originally, I was using a Gradient Wipe transition in Premiere and trust me when I say the final result is almost indistinguishable from that wipe, so WTF again, but whatever, it made me happy); using some blending modes in the fades between 3:19-3:21; and then a blending mode plus misc other effects on the final shot of the vid (where B&W angry, bitter James "I've got my armor back" Bond looms over the shot of him holding dead!Vesper on the rooftop). Everything else was done in Premiere.
I've never done a tutorial-ish post before, but I thought I'd give this one a whirl before dumping my source files for the project. If this is useful to anyone, please do let me know and maybe I can keep on with this sort of thing.
The vid: Skin (James Bond/Casino Royale)
For reference, I'm using After Effects 6.5 Professional. And an obvious note here is that this is how *I* happened to obtain this particular result...I'm not claiming it's the only (or even the best) way ;)
The first step was to get a rough idea of whether or not the effect would be worth the work, which I did by using the Color Pass effect in Premiere. Color Pass is pretty simple: there's a color picker with which you select the color that will be "passed" (i.e., it will be left behind in your clip and all other colors desaturated) and a slider to set how much similarity to the selected color you want to include. This was sufficient for me to get a notion of how the effect would look and to decide that yes, I liked it. Next, I laid out that section very carefully in Premiere before taking it into AE. I wasn't sure exactly how I'd do the spot color, but I figured it would be a pain in the ass and I didn't want to bother working on even a single frame that I wasn't ultimately going to use. Laziness = efficiency!
There's an effect in AE called Leave Color that is similar to Premiere's Color Pass but (as per usual with AE) more precise, with more adjustable parameters. That's what I started with.
The Leave Color effect panel. Experiment with all of the parameters, and don't forget the "Match colors" pulldown -- the "Using Hue" setting worked best for most of my clips, but there was one shot of Vesper underwater (at 3:16) for which the "Using RGB" option (which I know, you can't see it in the image...but it's there, *hee*) was vastly better. It was good enough, in fact, that nothing further was required on that particular shot.
If you've fiddled with color keying, then you know that it only works perfectly if your focus color is unique in the source...and here (with the exception of that aforementioned underwater shot) it was not. The shots below are a sampling of problematic frames with just Leave Color applied.
Leave Color is fairly effective here, but you can see that her left arm, handbag straps and Bond's back/ear (yum/yum! sorry, can't help it) retain some unwanted color.
And this is obviously the clearest example of how Leave Color on its own wasn't going to be enough. It's an interesting look, but not what I was shooting for!
So, as you can see above, I could get the dress red with Leave Color, but then other bits of color were also left behind in most frames. My solution was to mask out the non-Vesper parts of each frame, and have an identical layer underneath that was entirely black and white. That would knock out the annoying artifacts. I should note that I hate doing animated masking (and they couldn't be static masks because Vesper is moving in every clip)...really tedious. This wasn't the worst case scenario, though, as the masks could usually get away with loosely following her form and didn't need a bazillion vertex points/keyframes (except when there was something close to or touching her dress that was picking up color, like, say, her fucking arms...but really, not that bad overall).
This is the result on that particularly bad frame above, now with masking. It's not perfect at all (let's not talk about that bag on her shoulder, which has loads of red in it...I debated trying to mask it out of every frame because all I really wanted to hit was her dress, but it's touching her and that would have made the masking much more complicated, so I ended up leaving it mostly red...though you can see it's kinda messy around the left edge in this shot), but I was shooting for a generally good-looking spot color effect versus flawlessness in every still frame.
And other than getting rid of the unwanted artifacts of Leave Color, there was another point to masking, though it's rather nitpicky and not really relevant to the basic idea of creating this effect (so you're safe to stop reading now if you're at all bored): in most cases, I was using a specific Magic Bullet filter in combination with a Levels adjustment to create "black and white" in this vid. Using Leave Color (or Color Pass) on its own created quite a different, darker black and white look. I know, it's stupid, right? But not all black and white looks are created equal, OK? Anyway, by using two layers (and remember, the top layer is mostly masked out and then I feathered the edges of the mask to blend), I could apply the same Levels/B&W filter combo to the bottom layer and achieve the customized black and white look that's used for most of the vid. This is easier to show than to explain.
Here's that first shot again, using only Leave Color. Note the tones of the black and white areas.
Here's the same frame, now masked out around Vesper to reveal the layer underneath, with the customized black and white look (higher white level, more contrast, bit more grainy which I think is in keeping with the B&W opening sequence from the film). Yeah, it's not a huge deal, but since I needed to do the masking anyway, I was glad to be able to maintain consistency with other parts of the vid where I used that same filter combo.
The spot color effect was the main use of AE for this vid. I also used it on the very first clip (totally mental on that one: Bond was talking in the background and nobody would have noticed because he's tiny and there's a lot of motion in the clip AND DID I MENTION: TINY, but I masked out his moving mouth, WTF); then at 0:32-0:33 to tweak the transition between the Miami traffic and Bond sitting in the cab (originally, I was using a Gradient Wipe transition in Premiere and trust me when I say the final result is almost indistinguishable from that wipe, so WTF again, but whatever, it made me happy); using some blending modes in the fades between 3:19-3:21; and then a blending mode plus misc other effects on the final shot of the vid (where B&W angry, bitter James "I've got my armor back" Bond looms over the shot of him holding dead!Vesper on the rooftop). Everything else was done in Premiere.
I've never done a tutorial-ish post before, but I thought I'd give this one a whirl before dumping my source files for the project. If this is useful to anyone, please do let me know and maybe I can keep on with this sort of thing.