How to isolate one color only in a shot?

[Tim O'Connor]

I have a shot in which I'd like evrything to be black and white except for a basketball which ideally

would be moving but if necessary could be done with the ball stationary and camera stationary too.

 

I edit with Final Cut Pro studio. Does anybody know how to do this? Thanks.

[Mark Duckworth]

I have a shot in which I'd like evrything to be black and white except for a basketball which ideally

would be moving but if necessary could be done with the ball stationary and camera stationary too.

 

I edit with Final Cut Pro studio. Does anybody know how to do this? Thanks.

 

I not really familiar with FCP. The last time I used it was in the mid nineties so I cant give you step by step instructions but most NLEs nowadays have the same basic feature set.

 

You can use a secondary colour corrector to isolate the basketball's colour (orange I am guessing). This will pick out everything in that hue of colour from your shot. Then you can simply desaturate the the rest of the colours in the shot. Keep in mind that any colours which are near the colour you are isolating (perhaps skin tones) will either become B&W or go a little funky. Then you will have to do some more color correcting to bring those colours back. Keep in mind there maybe some spill from the ball (like from a green or bluescreen) that may be on your subjects as well when they are close to the ball so you may have to mask or roto to get rid of it. Good Luck.

[Brett Topey]

i've experimented with this a little in FCP. here's something to try:

 

use the 3-way color corrector. first bring the saturation all the way down.

 

at the bottom of the screen for the color corrector appear the words "limit effect." click on the arrow in the bottom left corner of the color corrector screen to bring up this tool. this will allow you to apply color correction to only certain colors in the frame.

 

use the saturation, color, and luminance selectors to isolate the color of the basketball. clicking on the basketball with the "select color" tool on the right side of the screen (the one that looks like an eye dropper) will give you a good start, and you can tweak from there.

 

at this point, the basketball should be black and white, and everything else should be color. click on the "invert" tool on the right side of the screen (the one with a trapezoid) to get the desired effect of a colored ball on a black and white background.

 

i don't know how well this will work if there are people in the frame (it might be hard to get the color of the basketball without also getting some skin tones--when i tried this, i was able to isolate a green object fairly easily, but i could not isolate a red object without picking up lots of skin tones). just try to make sure there's nothing in the frame that is of a color similar to the basketball. good luck.

[Tim O'Connor]

Thanks guys! That's a big help and it seems like it's not going to be as unapproachable an effect

as I had worried.

 

Something occured to me after reading your replies which I'm going to test out and which might help

anybody attempting this effect. I know that in black and white films they often did things that looked

pretty funky but worked for the movies, such as green lipstick on the hero cowboy.

 

Similarly, maybe for something like a basketball which might be tough to isolate without affecting

certain skintones, the faces that going to be black and white could have make-up of a non skin tone hue

(like Blue Man Group maybe) but not so dark as I believe that black and white may not differentiate

hue so much but a really dark make-up job might stand out.

 

Pretty psyched by the possibility of being able to do this!

[Joseph Winchester]

It would be very simple to rotoscope the basketball in After Effects or possibly FCP.. Try making two layers of the same video on the timeline, the bottom being black and white, the top color with an eight point garbage matte. Then keyframe the matte points each frame to follow the ball bouncing. After Effects masks will be much cleaner, but you might have good luck in FCP.

[Tim O'Connor]

It would be very simple to rotoscope the basketball in After Effects or possibly FCP.. Try making two layers of the same video on the timeline, the bottom being black and white, the top color with an eight point garbage matte. Then keyframe the matte points each frame to follow the ball bouncing. After Effects masks will be much cleaner, but you might have good luck in FCP.

 

Terrific! Thanks.

[Chris Keth]

I'm definately no effects wiz, but you could probably color-key out the orange of the basketball then invert the mask.

[Hal Smith]

Paint the ball green. Now it'll key close to 100% and it's nowhere near skin tone.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Paint the ball green. Now it'll key close to 100% and it's nowhere near skin tone.

 

Ball stationairy... Camera Stationairy... use photoshop.

 

Just take a frame with the ball in it. As long as nothing crosses in front of the ball, just cut it out in photoshop. Export it as a PNG with an alpha channel. Import it back into your shot on a video track. And desaturate your background plate.

[Chris Keth]

Ball stationairy... Camera Stationairy... use photoshop.

 

Just take a frame with the ball in it. As long as nothing crosses in front of the ball, just cut it out in photoshop. Export it as a PNG with an alpha channel. Import it back into your shot on a video track. And desaturate your background plate.

 

That's just a tedious, bad solution. It can be done with a moving ball and camera and look just as good.

[Andres Pardo aka Gral Treegan]

That's just a tedious, bad solution. It can be done with a moving ball and camera and look just as good.

 

Hi!!!

 

you can do this easily in a telecine.

 

if not... cose youre not going into telecine.... dont try to do in FCP.

 

try with shake is the best soft in low price that can do that in a pro way, or discreet combustion is good choice too.

 

to have good result youre going to work in a combination of rotoshape and destaurate.... maybe keying as well.

 

painting the ball is funny idea (green) but have to be carefull if the ball is close to the floor or to a iluminated wall cose the green will give you a green shadow and the key will take this out too so youre going to have a new prblem there.

 

how long will be this work? rotoshape all!!! is the best way and will have better results!!

 

bye!

Treegan

[seth christian]

I'm in complete agreeance with mr Treegan....dont do this in FCP.

If you're looking to do this stuff in future projects...getting

Combustion or Shake is worth the money for various contexts.

They are very powerful. Use the rotoscope upon a key around the

ball route, because with

all other methods in this forum about messing with color desat's, etc.

you're gonna lose some information out of the basketball.

 

Personally, I like Combustion over Shake, but both are top-of-the-line!

Edited May 7, 2007 by seth christian