OT - TV Video effect

Mar 30, 2019 Last reply: 7 years ago 26 Replies
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I was intrigued by an effect on a documentary where old still photos were given an effect wherby the main foregound seems to move in front of the background.



I wondered how it is done but couldn't Google it as I don't know the name of the effect.



It is as though the forground has been cut out and placed in front of the background and then some movement is introduced - but you never see a hole where the cut-out came from!


"Jim K.." snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk:

Thanks - the Content-Aware Fill is the bit I couldn't understand.

I've wondered about that effect also. The content-aware fill is amazing, but I don't think that's what I see on TV, and anyway I don't think it would work very well on a complex image rather than vague greenery. On TV the expanding foreground always covers the hole it's cut out from so you don't see it.

Yes, the parallax movement is the easy bit: you can write software which has the same effect as moving the foreground object relative to the background object on pieces of cardboard.

The hard part is filling the gap that is formed by cutting out the foreground object from its background in a still photo. And I imagine that for anything other than a very simple background that is achieved by making the foreground a slightly larger that the background that it was cut from, so as it moves, the hole is always wholly (*) covered by the foreground.

(*) I've been dying to make that pun ;-)

It must have all been done by hand before software got involved ...

Nope. cut out the foregrund and paint in the background.

Obviously magic. I suppose the background part could be from a completely different image.

Jethro_uk <jethro snipped-for-privacy@hotmailbin.com wrote in news:q7nnt2$v92$3@dont- email.me:

No -

Wurmser captions. ;-) Captain Pugwash, etc. Ideal training for new cameramen.

I thought that's what the job title 'Rostrum camera' was all about on the named credits at the end of a program ?.

I think Ken Morse specialised in the Ken Burns effect! But that's different from parallax, just panning while zooming, no layers.

Its been in photoshop for a few version now. It varies in performance from "nice try, but meh" to "that's witchcraft"... Much depends on the actual subject matter.

(You might also be able to get the same effect if you have multiple photo's of the same or a similar scene, where a bit of composition will get you a unbroken background even if it does not exist in any one frame)

That's the point. The video was (sort of) implying that you could get a perfect fill without multiple images.

You can't do that with the old photographs the effects were done on.

Of course you can idiot!

Scan in the photo and the rest is photoshop.

Usually you can... you can do it manually with the clone tool in many cases, and perhaps a bit of healing brush.

However the "content aware" fill or delete options will also work fully automatically in some cases, or at least get you 90% of the way there only requiring minimal manual touch up.

In the case of one of the images from the video, I grabbed a frame and pasted it into PS CS5, and made a very rough selection using the lasso tool:

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Then selected Fill from the edit menu, and set the opacity to 100% and Use to "Content aware", and hit OK. The result was:

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Not perfect - you can pick out a bit of repetition - but more than good enough for the job in hand, since you won't see it for long, and much of it will be covered anyway.

Exactly. As I said, cut out the foreground and paint in the background.

While true, the "paint in the background" bit may be interpreted by some as requiring a manual painting operation (or more likely a painting using image snapshots from adjacent areas of the photo)

The content aware tools reduce that down to a select and fill operation with no user skill or aptitude actually required.

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