Beam Me Up! How to Make Your Own Transporter - Page 2

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Today, we can do just about all of that in our computers, which is why there are several fan-created homages to the original Star Trek series on the Internet.

I have no desire to don a yellow tunic and wear pointy sideburns (let alone pointed ears), but I wanted to end a recent edition of my Silicon Graffiti video blog with a transporter effect. Here’s how I created the shot in front of my green screen, which I them composited into a virtual set.

First, lock your camera on a tripod and tape the person you want to beam down in front of a green screen. (For some tips on working with green screens, including lighting them, see my September 2007 article in Videomaker magazine.) Have your talent say “Energize!” or “Beam me up, Scotty,” or whatever you’d like him to do to help sell the shot. Make sure your talent holds reasonably still for a few seconds, and then have him walk out of the shot.

Import this footage from your camcorder into your favorite editing program. I used Adobe's Premiere Pro 2.0, but any program with similar plug-ins available (which we'll discuss in a bit) will do the trick.

Create four video tracks on your timeline. Drop the footage of your actor in front of the green screen into track one:

Then copy that footage and paste it into track four, making sure that that track is in sync with the footage on track one.

Tracks three and four are where your beam-out particles will go. But first, let’s concentrate on track four, and create the matte necessary to hide them.

Track four is where your matte will be created so that the beam-out effect is only visible within the shape of the talent’s body, not bleeding over onto the rest of the screen.

First, you’ll want to disable the sound on track four’s corresponding audio track. Next, insert two plug-ins from the Effects Bin in Premiere Pro: Chroma Key and Alpha Adjust.

To set the Chroma Key plug-in, move its eyedropper tool to Premiere’s playback window to get the exact color of the green screen behind your actor. (This is where carefully lighting the green screen so that it’s evenly lit pays off.) Then adjust the Similarity setting in the Chroma Key plug-in until only a small halo from the Green screen remains.

The Alpha Adjust plug-in is where the fun starts to happen. Set its Opacity to 100 percent, if it isn’t at that setting when you begin. Initially, you should see something like this:

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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