Schindlers The Girl In The Red Coat

[sjj1805]

Perhaps the most moving image in Steven Spielberg's epic Schindler's List is the little girl in the red coat, one of only four colour images in the three-hour black and white film. Our attention is drawn to the little blonde tot, overlooked by the Nazi troops, who wanders alone amid the horror and panic. She is wearing a red coat which draws the viewer to her even when she is but one of a hundred people in a wide shot.




What I shall be doing here is creating a scene in black and white but with a moving object in full glorious colour - What you may find surprising is that I will ONLY be using Corels products VideoStudio 11+ and PhotoImpactX3.

Although this might seem a time-consuming exercise you should take into account that you are only likely to use this method for a few seconds at a time. Because we are dealing with moving images you do not need to be as accurate as you are when dealing with a single still image. Therefore the process does not take as long as you might first expect.

If you are part of a production company doing this for profit then you can give this routine to a member of your team who can spend a bit more time perfecting the outline of the coloured area(s) whilst other members of your team work on other parts of your production.

If you are an individual piecing together a home video then you need not be so accurate - the end result will still impress your friends and family.

Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration.

To demonstrate this technique I am using a sample Video supplied with VideoStudio 9 - Sampl-V07.mpg

Step 1.
Create a folder on your hard drive to hold all of the extracted images.

Step 2.
Open VideoStudio and place the video on the time line.


Only place the part of the video that you will be applying this effect to - use the scissors tool to extract just that piece of video - Remember that a video is made up of several individual picture frames. There are 25 frames per second if you are using PAL and almost 30 per second if you are using NTSC. If you are going to do a 10 second clip in PAL you will be generating 250 images each of which will be processed individually using this method. Each image can take up to 30 seconds to process using this method and so a 10 second clip could take 125 minutes to complete - roughly 2 hours dependant upon how accurate you wish to be outlining the image area to retain its colour.

Step 3.
To generate individual picture frames you now create a video sequence file. To do this go to the share tab


Create Video File - Custom.


Select Ulead Image Sequence Files


Select Options then make sure you have selected RGB 24 bit True Colour BMP format.


Select FRAME based


If you now open your folder where you saved the image sequence file to then you will see each individual frame has now been saved as an image.


You can now close VideoStudio.

Step 4.
Open PhotoImpact and select Browse from the tool bar menu.


Navigate to the folder containing your image files


Right click an image then "Select all"


Then "Open"


Step 5.
Now we process each image one at a time. The procedure for each one is the same and so obviously I shall only do the first one here in this tutorial.
The amount of time and effort you put into this will determine the quality of your final completed video. Because the images are flashing before our eyes at (PAL) 25 frames per second you need not be too accurate.

Step 5 a.
From the tool bar select Object / Extract Object


Step 5 b.
Outline the area that you want to keep in colour.


Step 5 c.
Click the [Next] button and then click on the picture OUTSIDE the area you want to keep.


Step 5 d.
Click [Next]


If you are happy with the extracted area click [OK] of to alter the extracted area click [Back] - remember there is no need to be too accurate because we are dealing with moving images not stills.

Step 6


From the layer manager hide the extracted Image and select the base image.


Step 7.
From the tool bar select Photo / Colour / Hue & Saturation


Step 8.
Move the saturation level to minus 100 (extreme left)


Click the OK button to return to the editor




Step 9.
"Show" the hidden top layer


Step 10.
Merge the objects


Step 11.
Close the image and save the changes.




Step 12.
Repeat the above process from Step 5a to here until all of the images have been processed. Now close PhotoImpact.

Step 13.
Open VideoStudio and then right click on the time line and select "Insert Video"


Navigate to the folder containing your Video Sequence file and select it


Step 14.
Preview your video and either render it or add it to your main movie.