Chromakey ASAP (faking a weather forecast)

Improvolone

We need to fake a weather forecast at work. We should be able to get the hardware (screen, camera, computer, monitors), but no one has ever done this before and I've decided to take the reigns on it.

What type of software/hardware set up will allow us to do a live capture and then feed the image with the digital images added in to an external monitor? For example, the person will be in front of the blue screen and the "weather map" will show on a large TV monitor. We've already contacted local news outlets and no one really has a portable weather broadcast system we can use.

If there is an open source product, awesome. We have some money we can spend, but not much.

seasleepy

It looks like Cinelarra has a chromakey plugin.
Kino has a mention of chromakey on their site, but it's only in the transitions section, so...

Wezoin

If you have access to a Mac, iMovie does chromakey very very simply and fairly well.

Improvolone

Does it do it live, or only in post?

Dratatoo

You could use the free Photo Booth App (Intel Macs with camera) which provides a very basic realtime chroma key function.

Advantage:

- Its free
- You only need to rent a machine instead of buying expensive HW and software

Disadvantage

- you might need to get an original isight firewire camera for greater flexibility (it isn't produced/sold anymore)
- you can only do really simple stuff with it

Edit - I will try out what the app can do with an integrated camera (Macbook Metal - 2008)

Edit 2:

Okay, I played around with the photobooth application.

It should be able to select other video sources.
Its to basic and lacking even the basic adjustment options. For example you could define a custom background, but you can't change it at runtime.
The program doesn't support fullscreen - the only way to make it fullscreen is to use the desktop zoom.

Edit 3:

A better idea is to use 2 ichat clients.

Ghetto version: You could try 2 macs which establish a ichat video chat over a local network. This means:

Mac 1: running ichat with video conference, the person which should appear in front has the croma key plugin activated and the effect panel open for switching the background. Ichat supports other video sources as well.

Mac2: running ichat video conference in fullscreen displaying the person which is sitting in front of mac 1. The projector is connected to Mac 2 cloning it's display.



I tried it and it worked pretty well with ichat, even with the horrible illumination in my room. I could even change the background in realtime.

Here is a photo of a Knuckles statue with a underwater background, so you get the idea. Videosource is the integrated camera above the Macbook display. The Samsung screen is connected to my Powermac G5 which displays the video conference in fullscreen:

Wezoin

iMovie will only do it in post, unfortunately. Doing it live would be a good bit tougher I expect. I don't think iChat allows you to pick your own background, but just does presets (like the fish)

Dratatoo

Ichat does, in the last page of effect selection you can select "own background". Drag and drop a pic (and maybe a movie) in it. Actually in the last effect page you can create multiple presets with different backgrounds. (which are lost if you close the program)