Black Silhouette in FCP

[swwack91]

I'm trying to get some footage that I shot on a green screen into just the black silhouette of the person. I keyed out the green just fine, but I can't seem to get the resulting matte to be solid black. The person had some white on their clothing and I can't get that white to turn to black.

Turning brightness and contrast down didn't help... the entire silhouette is black EXCEPT for the few white details on the clothes. I've tried using the Extract and Threshold filters as well... same results. I can't seem to find a way to get that white to go away.

I wish Final Cut had a Photoshop-esque ability to just say "Layer Color Overlay..." I basically just want to take everything except the Alpha channel and make it solid black...

 

[huntercr]

I'm trying to get some footage that I shot on a green screen into just the black silhouette of the person. I keyed out the green just fine, but I can't seem to get the resulting matte to be solid black. The person had some white on their clothing and I can't get that white to turn to black.

Turning brightness and contrast down didn't help... the entire silhouette is black EXCEPT for the few white details on the clothes. I've tried using the Extract and Threshold filters as well... same results. I can't seem to find a way to get that white to go away.

I wish Final Cut had a Photoshop-esque ability to just say "Layer Color Overlay..." I basically just want to take everything except the Alpha channel and make it solid black...

Are you saying you want this to look like the iPod commercials?

While I'm sure there's probably a better way of doing this,
CHV has a free plugin called iSilhouette that might do what you want.

http://www.chv-plugins.com/cms/Downloads/Downloads.php

 

[swwack91]

Yeah, I guess I'm going for the iPod commercial look... although I didn't realize that until everyone keeps saying it.

The iSilhouette filter doesn't work for me... it just makes the video 1 solid color. Doesn't seem to work well with the alpha channel key from the chroma keying...

 

[huntercr]

Yeah, I guess I'm going for the iPod commercial look... although I didn't realize that until everyone keeps saying it.

The iSilhouette filter doesn't work for me... it just makes the video 1 solid color. Doesn't seem to work well with the alpha channel key from the chroma keying...

Disable your chroma key filter. This plugin does the whole thing for you...

In the filter:
1) go to the "color 1" section and select your green screen with the droplet picker ( and adjust the tolerance and average area to fit )
2) select "invert selection". in the general settings section of the filter.
3) fine tune the selection with the the "smooth" , "choke" and "antialias" sliders to where you like it.

Done!

It's not perfect and just like most filters, requires a bit of creativity to get the results you want, but hopefully this will work for you!

( a small amount of instructions can be found here... at leats it gives you a visual to go by anyway...
http://www.chv-plugins.com/cms/Fx-Script/iSilhouette/iSilhouette.php
)