Is cutting a specific section from a video possible

chameleon81 said:

Hi all,

I wonder if cutting objects from a video is possible. Let me explain it by giving an example,

There is movie where a kitten walks on the table. Can I "cut" the kitten part of the movie?

Thanks for the help

Click to expand...

Technically yes with a program like Final Cut. However, there is a lot of work involved with you needing to cut around the cat frame by frame. Even then, unless the cat was around a green screen, you will still be able to tell that the cat was cut from a video with bleed through of the old content.

If I'm not mistaken you want to split the video clip (ie trim from the middle).

This is easy to do but you may need a basic understanding of how the editor you are using handles the files (ie transcoding, using proxy, sharing the finished video in a format that is compatible with your use, etc) so that you don't get overwhelmed. I am a little concerned about the size of the "movie" you want to edt.

Best bet would be to check out an iMovie tutorial on YouTube; I'm sure there are many decent enough ones to get you started.

Also, there is Apple's own help website (link below) for iMovie.

http://help.apple.com/imovie/mac/10.0/

iMovie is certainly not the only app you can use but it may be the best place to start.

Good luck with it!

The complexity in what you want to achieve completely depends on the clip and how convincing you need it to be, but in all probability it will be a royal pain in the butt & simply more hassle than it's worth.

Basically you have to ask yourself - how important is it??

Yes, with rotoscoping.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping

Freeze the frame and then cut and then copy and paste.

chameleon81 said:

Hi all,

I wonder if cutting objects from a video is possible. Let me explain it by giving an example,

There is movie where a kitten walks on the table. Can I "cut" the kitten part of the movie?

Thanks for the help

Click to expand...

YES. You can do it. The easy way is a "green screen". You shoot the video with the cat walking on a green background. (we pick the color green because it is unlikely the cars has any green fur. But if it does, pick a blue screen)

Now you can go into FCPX and select out the background. You may have to do some more selecting if the light is not even so there are different shades of green.

you CAN also do this without the green cloth backdrop but now you are selecting out a table. It works the same way but now the job will take 100 times longer on less you have some solid table cloth that strongly contrasts with the cat's color.

As a last resort, or a first choose if you have a huge budget. you can export your video as a "sequence of images" The video editor can convert the video footage to MANY still images in TIFF format. Then you go into Photoshop and cut out the cat for each of the hundreds of still images and then convert them back to video.

If you really wanted to do this you'd likely do a hybrid. Use Photoshop and conversion to/from still images. Do most of the work in the video editor then clean up a few frames in Photoshop.


In the "old day" of film they used of have mat artists who who paint out a background, frame by frame. They would enlarge the frame to about two feet wide and the artist would paint on some kind of clear film. Then they shoot the mat(s) and do the compositing in an optical printer. Video is not really so different. We have some automation now but it only works well in the easy case of a green screen.

The cheap, not so good way is to us the chroma key feature in Final Cut and try to "key out" the table top's color and it might even almost work if it is very different from your cat's color.

Better to simply re-shoot the cat on a green backdrop.