Bluescreening

The goal in 'bluesceening' is to make the background in a single color, so you can tell Movie Maker to treat that color as if it was transparent. In the computer environment, a single color can start as a perfectly even one.... like RGB values of 0, 0, 255 being all blue. But by the time you go through screen captures and video file compressions to get a moving image in front of the bluescreen, the end result isn't a perfectly solid color.

Movie Maker handles variations in blueness much better than variations in other colors, so we'll use a blue screen.

In last week's newsletter I gave a link to a short blue-screened video... a stage performance with our grandson Nick in it. The surprise performer was Aeromouse, added by bluescreening. Here's the link again...

This image is a composite from about every 4th frame of the animation clip... being previewed in the MM2.1 collection.

The first library training session of the season was very well attended... the subject of YouTube brought more out than the subject of Movie Maker. I hadn't prepared, and used last year's handouts made for Movie Maker and Photo Story, combined with my website. Overall it went well.

For interactive support sessions I've been using the Skype service to free up my home phone line, and an Xbox 360 bluetooth headset to free up my hands. They work well in tandem with SupportSpace and GoToMeeting sessions.

The background in the movie project can be any image or video clip... it's the foreground that needs the transparency to let the background show through. The overlapping is done by a custom transition with the two clips overlapped as fully as they can be, all but that last frame or two. A fade to black effect on the bluescreened clip takes away any flash of blueness at the end.

In the analog world, use blue paint, blue sheets or fabric, anything blue you can video moving characters in front of.

The digital world is easier... if all you want is a couple ducks like these... from GifAnimations.com

Any graphics app can do blueness... so can other software such as Excel or Word. For a blue background that shows animated GIF files over it, I tried a number of things and settled on a web page. In second place was an email like this one with a solid blue background.

Simply replace the duck file with your own animated GIF... and change the size in the html code to align with the size of the new image.

Shoot the ducks or other animated GIF with your camcorder or camera, capture them with the Encoder, or do whatever else you want that will give you a video clip to use in Movie Maker.

I didn't have my bluescreen web page at the time I captured the mouse animation, so I used the Paint.exe app. Make the canvas whatever size you want. I used about 700x500, slightly larger than the 640x480 screen capture I was planning. Use the paint bucket to fill it blue - 255 (the maximum... all blue), with zero red and green. Here's a screen shot of the bluescreen as Aeromouse makes his appearance.

Here's a link to run Aeromouse . Let him run around your computer screen as you read this. No need to download first. He's fun and 'digitally clean'.

I moved the bluescreen around so it was toward the bottom of my laptop screen, and dragged and dropped Aeromouse many times so I'd capture him moving across the bluescreen (you can do that... drag and drop the mouse... here he is being dropped on the newsletter).

I hadn't preplanned using it in a widescreen project like the dance scene, as I ended up doing... Movie Maker 2.1 resizes a video clip to fit the working aspect ratio. In this case, a slightly fatter mouse is OK.

The bluescreened mouse clip overlaps the dance scene as fully as it can. I fade it to black so you miss seeing the last couple frames of blueness flashing by.

There are a number of custom bluescreen transitions you could apply. I used the XML code on my website's Edit Movies > XML - Persian Section > Script Types > Compositing page... the transition named "Chroma Blue". Here's a link to a copy of my xml file.

One thing to be careful of when doing such bluescreening is the audio of the starting clip. Just as the visual fades from one clip to the next in a transition, so does the audio. If you don't want the gradual fading of the audio, drop another copy of the clip onto the Audio/Music track and mute the one on the video track.

Once you have the blue-screened mouse footage, it's available to accent other videos. Build your own library of bluescreened clips.

I'm currently writing a review of CrazyTalk software, a specialty item that animates a face from a single still picture.

Here's a short video clip that started with Cat Scan... one of those oldie images in a book of copyright free pictures. I made the talking clip in CrazyTalk and assembled it in Movie Maker with the bluescreen mouse footage.

If you're really fussy about pixels, you may see artifacts in the bluescreened clips, no matter which method you use to capture them. If so, you can skip this kind of effect when heading to high quality DVDs or big screen viewings.

But if you're just having fun and putting clips on YouTube, the artifacts won't get in the way. Enjoy them!

And yes, it'll be thumbs up for CrazyTalk. Look for the review in a month or two at BrightHub.

I look forward to comments and discussion about this and other newsletters on the forums at:

I'm involved in anything and everything that supports the users of Movie Maker and Photo Story, and adding more regularly. Some are free and others reasonably priced.

About John 'PapaJohn' Buechler from Microsoft.com

John "PapaJohn" Buechler, of Kalamazoo, Mich., goes by PapaJohn online. An avid user of Movie Maker since its first release, and a regular supporter of the community of Movie Maker users, John received a 2003 MVP award from Microsoft for that support. In March 2003, he started a comprehensive website about Movie Maker 2 at www.PapaJohn.org. He maintains the website, writes books and articles, teaches, and provides support services - all for the community of Movie Maker 2 users. An engineer by formal education, John is a computer database and multimedia expert by business and personal experience. He co-authored the first book about Movie Maker 2 and is actively working on a second one. You can find his advice in the Windows XP Movie Maker newsgroup and in the Windows Movie Makers Forums.

This newsletter is republished with permission of John "PapaJohn" Buechler.
Please note that this is an archive of newsletters and some information may become outdated. PapaJohn, and the webmaster of this site, provides this information "AS IS" with no warranties.

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A Little 'Bluescreening'