Wire removal and background plates

[zero_1one1]

I am working on a stop motion film that requires to acrobatics for the characters as well as complicated camera "movement" techniques. I am going to have to purchase new editing software to effectively edit the film. I was wondering if anyone here knows of a program that allows you to remove wires and place in background plates over blue/green screens. This information will be greatly appreciated

Thank you for your time,
William J Long III

[Zensteve]

Both Premiere and AfterFX (Adobe software) can be used for green-screening & chroma-keying. Likely Vegas does as well, but since I don't have that, can't say for sure. It's a fairly straightforward procedure.

Wire Removal - I bought some software called "Commotion" a few years back that could do that. I never used it... but it could do it. 8) It was kinda pricey (at the time) but I am sure there is something better available now.

If you're doing the "complicated camera movements" you'll be wanting to look for software that has decent motion-tracking with it... however, you mention it is also stop-motion...

The wires will be supporting a very lightweight puppet/model of some kind? If so, the wires required would be really thin, like fishing nylon. You could fake zipping up the thin line by using the "Clone" tool in Photoshop, frame by frame. Rotoscoping takes a while... but so does stop-motion, anyway.

[film8ker]

I’ve never done this, I’m just throwing out ideas. In AE, if it’s on chroma green, you could motion track a chroma block over the wires (like pixelating a face). You’d probably have to set keyframes every frame, but that would isolate the subject against the green, and then you could just key in the BG with any program that had a chroma key function.

[zero_1one1]

Thanks for the advice and I will definately take it all into account. This project is my opportunity to create something that Hollywood will never do in a way that costs much more time than money.

I will most definately look into the programs mentioned and I will post frequent updates for the project. At the current time I am building the scaled city streets and motion-testing the models and camera "movements" that I intend to use.

Thanks again for your interest,
William J Long III

[arniepix]

Commotion used to be the standard for wire removal, but they seem to have stopped development a couple of years ago. Now you'd probably look at either After Effects Pro (Adobe) or Commotion (Pinnacle) to do both the keying & wire removal, or you could look at Studio Artist at http://www.synthetik.com/ to do the wire removal after it's been keyed.

[JonnyMac]

The latest version of Vegas (5) has a very cool Bezier masking tool that can be used for complicated (and animated) masking. This in conjunction with chromakeying may solve your problem.

[Shaw]

You could try using the clone tool in AE if you don't want to completely replace the background.

Also, something to mention - AE has much better Chroma capabilities than Premiere (IMO of course). Well, at least the latest profession 6.5 does.