Forums (I/O Tower)
Forums 
 Film Production 
 Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!


New New Comments | Post No Change | Locked Closed
AuthorComments:  Page: of 1 Page
Tron Fanatic
User

Posts: 1,461
Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!

on Saturday, August, 05, 2006 10:37 PM
I may have figured out how. I wrote a a 'factory' filter today for Adobe Premiere that has proven capable of finding the circuits and ONLY the circuits in a costume photo by singling out specific hues in the image.

"Doesn't Adobe already have a filter like this?" Sort of...

This is Premiere's Colorpass filter set to locate only the green portion of the image (and change it to magenta). You'll notice that it only grabs a small piece of the green, and not much of the lighter or darker shades.


Increasing 'fuzziness' to widen the range of the selection not only adds the shades, but also widens the colors. In a complex image, this can quickly lead to trouble, selecting things that we wouldn't want to add a glow to.


Additionally, even if it worked properly, it would still leave us with the trouble of having to filter the image again to turn it into a true matte-style layer.

The solution (I hope) is Hue Isol8or (someone play a quick 'superhero' jingle for me...)

Here is how Isol8or appears when you first apply it to an image in Premiere (using the same basic color-chart as shown above).


Isola8or is set to include the entire spectrum initially. What you have to do is narrow the band down to include only the color you want (presumably, the color of the circuits that you've painted onto your costume or prop).

Here is Isol8or set to include only a narrow band of green on the spectrum.


Notice that not only does it select all shades of the color, but it also sets the color to pure white and everything else to pure black. This removes another step in the 'tron glow' process. We still have a slight problem though. You'll notice that near where the color becomes near complete white or black, the beam spreads out slightly. This is because it is hard for a computer to determine what color an extremely bright or dark pixel actually is. This could lead to unwanted glows. And so, I have also included sliders that allow you to limit the brightness of the color.


I'm still tweaking this thing, and I will probably add sliders to control saturation as well (because gray shades often cause the same kind of confusion as luminance). But I had to try it out on a real subject.


I decided on Tronguy, because I know he wouldn't mind, hehe, and because he did an excellent job with the painting on the costume, using a vibrant blue that the filter picks up quite easily. The actual film costumes don't work well with this since their circuits are black.

The resulting image is made up of 3 layers.

1. The original (I darkened it a little so that the glow was more noticable)

2. The circuit 'surface' which has isol8or, and a tiny gaussian blur applied.

3. The circuit glow, with isol8or, a larger gaussian blur, and color balance.

Layers 2 and 3 have the screen transparency set, and... viola!


Tronguy with glowing circuits, and NO hand-painting!

My final intent for this of course is to apply glowing circuits to live video, which I can't try because my camera is crap and I have no proper lighting to do a test run. But I just had to show this thing off now. I figure this could be used for other effects too, such as lightsabers, but I built this for nothing other than making Tron Fanfilms.

'>
 
NoExcuses
User

Posts: 1,760
Re: Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!

on Sunday, August, 06, 2006 6:01 AM
I found that a good way to do it for black and white circuitry was to do thisin Photoshop - from the Tower Guardian onwards (check my post in this thread), I just inverted the colours on the image, made it black and white, knocked the contrast up to full and changed the brightness until I was left with just white circuitry on a black background.


 
Boingo_Buzzard
User

Posts: 0
Re: Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!

on Sunday, August, 06, 2006 12:05 PM


No manual painting would be awesome. It does kind of suck trying to trace all those lines.

where to buy abortion pill ordering abortion pills to be shipped to house buy abortion pill online


 
TheReelTodd
Sector Admin

Posts: 0
Re: Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!

on Sunday, August, 06, 2006 3:35 PM
Wow - that's really cool, Tron Fanatic!

What version of Premiere are you using?

Will this be a plugin that can be added to the plugins folder?

I've played with adding glow to video before - I got decent results when the video is brightly lit and there is little to no motion blur. The motion blur kills the ability to hone in on the shape of the circuitry line properly.

I did my FX entirely in PhotoShop via a batch operation though. It's slow, but it works.

For a LONG time, I've been wanting to do some kind of video with a TRON character... ok, with me in a TRON circuitry suit of a custom design. But I just don't have one.

This is actually what first brought me to TRON-Sector a few years ago - I was in the process of trying to build my circuitry suit and wanted to make a TRON themed video production (or very short fan film, if you will). The suit never got off the ground and I never did anything other then my test videos. I think I did three or four of them.

I made this short demo around November 2003.-->



 
Qix77
User

Posts: 2,991
Re: Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!

on Sunday, August, 06, 2006 6:10 PM
Thats really cool, but is there a way to do it in Photo Shop or Paint Shop Pro?


 
Tron Fanatic
User

Posts: 1,461
Re: Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!

on Monday, August, 07, 2006 7:09 AM
TheReelTodd Wrote:Wow - that's really cool, Tron Fanatic!

What version of Premiere are you using?

Will this be a plugin that can be added to the plugins folder?

I've played with adding glow to video before - I got decent results when the video is brightly lit and there is little to no motion blur. The motion blur kills the ability to hone in on the shape of the circuitry line properly.

Aye, it's a plugin. All I'm running is old Premiere 5.1. Outdated but it gets the job done.

Unfortunately I don't have the video equipment, lighting, or blue screening to give this thing a proper test.

My hope though is that even with a motion blur, it should be able to find the circuits, if you de-interlace the video first. By example, if the costume has red circuits, and you're in front of a blue screen, then motion-blurred circuits would probably come out purple. So you'd just need to make sure the filter looks for both red and purple. It still might not work in all situations, but it would still take a lot of the dirty work away from a project.

'>
 
TheReelTodd
Sector Admin

Posts: 0
Re: Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!

on Monday, August, 07, 2006 7:11 PM
Tron Fanatic Wrote:Aye, it's a plugin. All I'm running is old Premiere 5.1. Outdated but it gets the job done.

Unfortunately I don't have the video equipment, lighting, or blue screening to give this thing a proper test.

My hope though is that even with a motion blur, it should be able to find the circuits, if you de-interlace the video first. By example, if the costume has red circuits, and you're in front of a blue screen, then motion-blurred circuits would probably come out purple. So you'd just need to make sure the filter looks for both red and purple. It still might not work in all situations, but it would still take a lot of the dirty work away from a project.

Yes - you need time saving ways to render visual FX. If you don't have that, the project will likely never get finished because it will become too laborious and consume too much time. I've scrapped many a project because they turned in to far bigger undertakings that I had the time to deal with. So anything that can speed up the process AND offer good results is an absolute must.

There will likely be some bad frames during motion blur. So long as they are not too many, perhaps they can be touched up manually later on. Filming with a high shutter speed can help minimize motion blur. The down side of that is extra lighting is needed. Something to try in your future video testing though.




 
NoExcuses
User

Posts: 1,760
Re: Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!

on Friday, October, 13, 2006 4:55 PM
I sent Tron Fanatic a PM about this, but he might not have noticed yet (I never notice when I've got a new PM). I've recently gotten a copy of Premiere (from everyone's favourite electronic auction site), and I was just wondering if the Hue Isol8or plugin was ever finished.

I'm going to be making a TRON spoof with my friends at some point, and Hue Isol8or would be a God send. If you did get it finished and are willing to distribute it, I'll send you my email address, and I'll give you full credit in whatever I use it in. It would be a great help!


 
Thane101
User

Posts: 8
Re: Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!

on Saturday, January, 06, 2007 1:18 AM
Hey Tron Fanatic! please check your messages...have you finished the pluggin yet?abortion pills online abortion questions cytotec abortion


 
Tron Fanatic
User

Posts: 1,461
RE: Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!

on Monday, December, 20, 2010 6:32 PM
So yeah, this response is years late, but I saw it and thought I might as well follow up on it anyway, explaining what finally became of this.

First, filter factory had serious limitations that hindered any further progress on this filter. The biggest factor was a lack of 'fuzziness.' This is a feature that all chroma-key fucntions have so that you don't get the sharp-edged 'sparkles' that made bluescreen effects from 80's television so obvious.

Second, Adobe, for whatever reason, stopped including filter factory in future versions Premiere, and if I'm not mistaken, Photoshop as well. This means the only people who could possibly make a new version of the filter, are those who know how to work with SDK's, and they generally charge a lot of money for their work.

Third, the high-def explosion of the past couple years, has drastically raised the bar for accuracy, making the task of special effects realism that much more difficult.

And of course, finally... since we will very soon have the ability to make TRON costumes the same way Disney did for Legacy, we may not even have a need to rotoscope circuit glows at all.

'>
 
 Page: of 1 Page
New New Comments | Post No Change | Locked Closed
Forums 
 Film Production 
 Tron Circuit Glows with NO manual painting?!