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Overlaying a potatoe onto a moving face in iMovie

post #1 of 11
2/26/13 at 6:42pm
Thread Starter 

Hello guys, hope you can help me.

 

So basically I got this short video of me and some friends, and what I wanna do is to replace the face of one of my friends with another picture -in that case the picture of another of my friends, but let say it's a potatoe for the sake of understanding.

 

So I found how to overlay a picture onto iMovie, it´s pretty simple when its not suppose to move and the picture is square sized.

 

However I'm facing a few problem that I seemingly cannot overcome:

 

First of all, the picture of the potatoe that I wanna insert. I can only crop the picture to create a square shaped picture, or as you can imagine my potatoe is not square sized and I do not want any potatoe field background to appear. So right now when I import the potatoe into the video it's not "clean".

So what is the preliminary work I should do on the picture before inserting it into iMovie? I tried paintbrush and iPhoto without finding satisfying tool.

 

Second. Once my picture is clean (no field is showing), I can put it in the video, it's picture in picture tool. But how can I change the position of the potatoe frame per frame? Because of course people are moving in videos.

 

 

Thank you very, very much guys :)

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post #2 of 11
2/27/13 at 4:48am
You should really use Motion for this as you need to keyframe the movement of the potato. To prepare the image, you can use an image editing app like Photoshop or Pixelmator but you can also mask it in Motion. Here's a video of what you'd be doing:



You can get Motion on the Mac App Store:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/motion/id434290957?mt=12

It's a bit expensive for potato tracking but it's actually insanely cheap vs competing apps that do this and with motion tracking you'd be able to switch out graphics no problem if you find a better looking potato image.
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post #3 of 11
2/27/13 at 5:40am
Thread Starter 

Omg 50 bucks for something that I will probably do one time only? I cannot afford it as a student... Thank you though. Would you do it for me?

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post #4 of 11
2/27/13 at 9:56am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yazolight View Post

Omg 50 bucks for something that I will probably do one time only? I cannot afford it as a student... Thank you though. Would you do it for me?

There's a free compositing app here you can use:

http://pixelconduit.com/downloads.html

You can import the movie, overlay an image, add animation curves to the potato and export.
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post #5 of 11
2/28/13 at 3:57pm
Thread Starter 

Thank you very much, I'm downloading it now.

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post #6 of 11
3/1/13 at 2:57am
Were you in that class taught by Dan Quayle?
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post #7 of 11
3/1/13 at 10:13am
Quote:
Originally Posted by tonton View Post

Were you in that class taught by Dan Quayle?

hehehehheehhehe...good one. I didn't have the nerve to say anything.

I save it for maggot ass droid dorks.   1wink.gif

andoid sucks, but not as much as the people who come here to defend it. they are also losers that suck

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andoid sucks, but not as much as the people who come here to defend it. they are also losers that suck

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post #8 of 11
3/4/13 at 12:31pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by tonton View Post

Were you in that class taught by Dan Quayle?

 

Nope, why? He likes to use potato as an example? I would be glad to attend such a class!

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post #9 of 11
3/4/13 at 3:27pm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/quayle3.htm
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post #10 of 11
3/9/13 at 12:32pm
Thread Starter 

Hahahaha ok I got it it's potato! English is my second language, I must keep on improving over and over again! Thanks for the notice :)

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post #11 of 11
3/10/13 at 9:18pm

Sounds like the problem is transparency. If I understand your question, you need to use something like Photoshop to create an alpha channel that excludes the background of the potato head overlay.

 

I think it can be done with open source free tools although I don't know which one as I use Adobe CS for those tasks.

Life is too short to drink bad coffee.

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Life is too short to drink bad coffee.

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