Hey, I have Adobe Premiere 6.5, and I was wondering if there was any way that you could take a scene, and speed up everything but an object that you want to move normally. I'm sure you've all seen it before on movies, one person is walking normally (or in slow motion) and everything is moving around him/her very fast.

It's a very cool trick, and would be very helpfull if I could use it on my project...

I know you could probably do it with Blue Screens and whatnot, but I don't have that kind of stuff to use...and I know you can do it without them.

So any help would be nice!
Thanks.

MuRpHmAn StUdIoS

Ok, I havent done this myself, but I know, essentially what you need to do is isolate the one character. Ofcourse, green screen would be best, but I believe it can be done without.
Your best bet would be to shoot a clean plate of the background. (shoot a long piece of footage of where you want him to walk, without him there. This will later be sped up in post. Shoot alot, you dont want to run out of footage once you increase the speed.) Then, you would need to shoot him walking toward the camera (or, whatever your shot of him is) and then rotoscope that. Again, i havent done it, and not really sure how it works. I know it would be much easier to isolate him if you had a blue, or green screen. Try finding a solid color background for him to walk against. Almost anything should help you delete the background. (If im wrong about any of this, dont be afraid to call me on it folks. I dont want to lead him astray.) Otherwise, good luck, hope you figure it out.
R. Michael McWhorter
Tizzy Entertainment
Storyboards

And you shall know us by the trail of dead.

That U2 video does that! I love that video!

I think Tizzy has an idea of how that was pulled off. You might need a really big green screen though, so that your character's own shadow won't cast its self on your blue/green screen. My friend told me about this problem, he is a animator at Microsoft with the X-Box division and knows alot about special effects! So keep that problem in mind while shooting.

"I don't have time for film school...I'm too busy making movies" lol

There are these bastards that my girlfriend knows and they are doing it just from a video that they have...no shooting the background, nothing. And I'm known around here for being good at all of this, and when my girlfriend asked if she knew how to do this, I said I could figure it out.

Ack...I've been shown up by druggies...

MuRpHmAn StUdIoS

Well, if you are using an excising video there is no way to do it with premiere. Like they said the best way would be to use a green screen.

Even if you could find a program that could isolate the character you would still have many problems, like the background would become shorter so you would then have to loop it and that wouldn't look good. Especially if the camera is moving. Plus you would have to paint in the path of the character moving.

So pretty much. You can't do it.

Sorry no nookie.

Well then how the hell did this person do it?
Ugh...it doesn't make sense, I know, but I guess they did it.

Those bastards.

MuRpHmAn StUdIoS

Hi Brandini:

I've seen people try to accomplice this by having one subject move very slowly while shooting so when you speed the clip up, it looks normal. This looks okay, not great. There's always motion artifacts. If you can't reshoot, this isn't an option anyway.

The only other way to do it w/o keying is to rotoscope, which is just a complex, changing mask. You can do it very crudely in Premiere with masks. If you don't have after effects, commotion or combustion, you might go crazy before you get good results, but it's possible. However, if the camera is locked down and the moving elements of the sped up footage don't get close (in the frame) to the normal speed subject, you won't have to get very precise with the masks and it'll be much easier.

If the normal speed subject is in the sped up footage and moves around the frame a lot, you will see it sped up, obviously. You can mask it out of the sped up footage and put clean background in it's place. Again, you can do this with masks in Premiere if the camera was locked down. ... but it won't be easy.

So basically, if your camera was locked down and the moving BG elements don't touch the normal speed subject, I'd try it with masks in Premiere (knowing it's very difficult). Otherwise, find some who has Commotion or After Effects and knows how to rotoscope well (and is willing to spend hours and hours working on it).

joren

Jeeze...how the hell did those guys do it?!?
Aparentally they did it in seconds...just BAM, and it was done...

Ugh...
Thanks for the replies, though...

MuRpHmAn StUdIoS