Embedding video in a tablet that's held by a character?

[Grant Crawley]

Hi [Ch] community,

I'm trying to figure out a better way to embed a video (screencast) into a device (tablet) that's being held by a character in one hand and pointed-to/touched with the other. Currently I'm using a green chroma for the device screen and then placing the screencast video in the layer behind and making the green chroma area transparent. It works, but the anti-aliasing on the puppet's hand is picking up a green glow.

This is before rendering, with the green chroma key.

This is after rendering once the screencast has been inserted using the chroma key. It's not the end of the world, but I would like to find a better method.

 

Ideally I would like to render the video with the sequence in place. For some other variations of this theme it's easy because the puppet isn't holding the device, and I can put the video in a layer behind the puppet. But in this case the video is within the puppet layer.

Does anyone have any suggestions for putting the video between layers of a puppet?

Can anti-aliasing be turned off for the puppet's hand?

Is there a better key to use than green?

Thanks in advance,

Grant.

[EuanWilliamson]

Hi Grant,

Two quick questions:

1) in the screen shots, the first is sharp and the second is blurry apart from the insert in the screen? Why?

2) In the first screen show you can see clean lines on the hand against the screen. Good keying and use of despill and maskk shrink should help a lot.

As to a keying colour, you can use any colour NOT in the rest of the image or use garbage masks.

[Grant Crawley]

Euan,

Thanks for your tips abut despill and masks. In the end I didn't need despill, but I did use a mask (but only because there's other green stuff on the screen).

The first screen shot is pre-render and so is taken directly from Character Animator. The second screen shot is after the video has been encoded using media encoder for YouToube 1080p Full HD and imported into a non-Adobe video editor for keying.

I have since tried the same with After Effects. It's perfect now. I always avoid AE as much as possible because it's such an awfully over-complicated tool - probably should use it more.

In the latest rendering it's perfect, no green at all 🙂 

Problem solved - use After Effects and import the Character Animator project - not a rendering.

Thanks all.

Grant.

[EuanWilliamson]

Great!  Glad you got it worked out 🙂

[alank99101739]

If the video is not too long, you could export as and image sequence and load up as "cycle layers" in the puppet. But not great for videos of any length.

Are you capturing with OBS Stidio or NDI or similar? Or exporting a video clip? Some file formats compress the images but introduce some blur. You could try exporting using a different file format to see if that is causing a problem. I was wondering if OBS or dynamic link would reduce edge bleed. (Not sure!)