With a bit more experience of the
Ultra key effect, I have decided to put these skills to use and experiment with the combination of my ideas. I have thought of ink in water when it smoothly flows, and I liked the idea of putting some imagery inside it. I own an aquarium at home and thought that capturing them in motion would go well with the context of this task, as both ink and fish are in the water.
Because I didn't have the right equipment to produce the footage of ink flowing in water, I decided to use some stock footage that I managed to find on YouTube in high definition.
To begin editing, I imported the necessary files into my project to set up my workspace. I inserted the ink footage on the Video 2 lane in the sequence, leaving the first video lane for the clip of the fish to go in in order for it to appear in the ink. I applied the
ultra key effect from the Keying folder in the effects tab.
At first, I colour picked the black using the pipette but I noticed that the result wasn't very satisfying. I noticed that in the effects tab for the current clip there was a variety of options so I decided to play around with these and see how each of these affected the footage. I managed to improve the quality of the ink, such as the edges looking much more cleaner and giving it a more crisp feel to it.
Some of the ink showed up as grey rather than black. I thought of improving this by making the clip more black and white by adding a
threshold effect to it and changing the settings to 170 for the best outcome.
 |
| BEFORE |
 |
| AFTER |
Once the ink was ready, I placed the footage of the fish in Video 1 lane of the sequence. However, I realised that some strands of black ink still showed on the edges. I thought of fixing this by changing the
opacity of the ink from
Normal to
Screen, which allowed the footage to show even through the smallest areas of black.
 |
| BEFORE |
 |
| AFTER |
Because the ink was filmed in slow motion, I thought that by waiting for it to show up on the screen properly will be too long, so I sped up as the ink shot up on the screen before slowing it down and revealing a slow-motion moving fish. I did this by using the
razor tool and the
rate stretch tool. These allowed me to cut the clips at certain areas and extend or shorten their length that changed the speed. However, because the footage that I took wasn't the best quality, the video looked rather glitchy, which did not appeal to me. I fixed this by right-clicking on the clip and selecting
frame blend so that the frames of the clip flowed smoother than before.
After the first attempt of satisfactory, I repeated the process on other combinations of footage to test out the different variations of composition between the ink and the fish. To end the task, I added a song
Treehouse by Dream Koala as I thought the music had the right atmosphere to match the mood of the effect.
During this task, I have discovered more about the ultra key effect as well as developed additional skills that helped me improve the use of ultra key as well as other purposes for future editing.
FINAL OUTCOME
