Making Videos on a Budget – How to Composite Your Own Pictures

January 17, 2009 by Butterfly Filed under: Video

If you have been contemplating putting an ‘infomercial’ video on your website or YouTube, in an effort to attract more business, you may be pleased to know you can actually do it for much less than you thought.

Digital cameras are very affordable these days and a good one with all the functionality you will ever need will cost you less than ?00.

Remember, don’t get hung up on the ‘Mega Pixels’ 7.2, 8.5, 10 or even 12. Yes, the higher the number means the better quality the picture or video, but it also means the bigger the file size, so it will take more memory to store your footage and pics. And it won’t matter anyway because when you come to edit and encode your video it will need to be compressed to a level which can be ’streamed’ to your viewers. Therefore a camera with around 5.0 mega pixels is more than enough.

Format. This is important because not every camera records video is the same format. So you need to check that the video editing software you are using is compatible with the cameras.

There are literally hundreds of different video editing software programs on the market, some costing many hundreds of pounds. But you will be pleased to know that one of the best ones is free and you probably already own it.

Windows Movie Maker Version 2 is installed as standard on all new PC’s and laptops. And it is the best place to start when learning how to put your own videos together. With it’s simple and intuitive storyboard layout you can quickly drag and drop your video footage segments and pictures on to the storyboard. You can then add ‘effects’ or transitions to the storyboard to make your video look seamless. Learning this program is easy but practice is essential to learn how all the effects and transitions compliment each other.

Learning good camera work is essential. But this takes time and lots of practice, so to get good results fast it would be advisable for you to concentrate on just ‘Static’ pictures. One big trick that gives you a great advantage is ‘compositing’ your picture. Now this is not as difficult as it sounds. In fact it’s very easy to do, as long as you know what to do.

The process of composting starts with the ‘Taking’ of the picture, it must be done on a ‘Black’ background. Then upload your picture to your PC. It is advisable to take your picture in 640 x 320 most videos are viewed in this size so the pictures don’t need to be any bigger than this. If your camera takes bigger pictures then just resize them in a program like Coral, photoshop or webplus. Once this is done open your picture using Microsoft ‘Paint’. Again this is free software and can be found an all PC’s as standard.

Next step is to ‘Remove’ the black background, by selecting the ‘Erase’ tool you can slowly click on the background of your picture turning it ‘white’. This process is much easier if you use the custom ‘Zoom’ feature up to the maximum 800% making the pixels much bigger and easier to delete.

Go around the main object in your picture with the erasure tool getting as many of the black pixels as you can without removing any from the object. This can take some time but it is worth it.

Once all the background has been removed your object in the picture should be totally isolated with a white background.

Now select your ‘Fill’ tool from the side panel and choose the black colour. Now fill the white background with the black.

The effect is simple and gives the picture a professional look. Now save it and repeat this process for all your other pictures.

Once completed you need to do one more picture. A black background with no object in it. Use your last picture you composited and open it up. Use the ‘Select’ tool from the paint menu and highlight your object. Now delete it. You should have a big white box where your object was. Select your FILL tool and fill the white box with black. Now save it as ‘BlackBackground’.

Once completed import all your pictures into Movie Maker.

On the storyboard always start with your BlackBackground picture in box 1, then add one of your composited pictures into the second position, box 2. Add a ‘FADE’ transition in between box 1 and 2 and then ‘preview’ the movie.

You should see a black screen then your ‘object’ smoothly fade in.

Now add the ‘blackbackground’ again but this time in Box 3, add another fade in between box 2 and three and then preview the movie again,

You should see your composited picture smoothly appear, hold for a few seconds and then slowly fade out.

Here’s an example video: uk.youtube.com/watch?v=h7TEhg3XswE