Got 3 video clips below...

The first - is a video set extension.  Now - this was a very quickie done with a camera set on a fence post and the matte was done in about 15 minutes. 

Here's a quick before and after.

Now on the left - you got the original.  On the right - we have new trees, mountains and so on.  Now - cool as this may be why on earth would you take the time to do this?  Because with a little smarts you might do your work once and have the ability to based on a users preferences be able to change advertisements on the fly in video content for users on the web.  So that instead of me just walking - it might instead be me walking past a billboard. 

Or even walking someplace that you want to have the user go someday.  Now the technology to do this is already here.  As I pointed out this took me - what 10 minutes to do a simple matte painting.  A bit more work and the content that you can create can be very clean and crisp.  It's a question of putting in the amount of effort you want to put into this.  Content will become more and more important as more and more people turn to the Internet for free entertainment.  The better we make the content, the more people will be flocking to us.

Here's the video from that goes along with the clips above.

Now - what all can we do with content?  Well just for fun ... my son asked if I could show him how to do the "Superman runs and flies off" thing from Smallville.  Which is, surprisingly pretty simple to pull off.  First you'll need some simple footage of someone running... then have them jump as high as they can.  Once you have that, go to the frame with the highest portion of the jump.  You 'll need to take that frame and copy it to a editor.  You'll need to clip out just the person in mid jump and leave the background transparent.

Once you have that copy it back into your composition software.  Place it on the image, at a spot after the person running is now completely out of the shot.  Begin from the highest jump frame - stretch the image and begin to adjust it over the five or six frames that take the image out of the shot.  Add some motion blur - and if you want to be fancy add some particle effects and a sound effect.  (See video clip #2). 

I've always had a hard time separating my work identity with my real life.  And although recently I made a point of trying to make sure work (Ctrl-Alt Deflate over at http://thebsod.blogspot.com) and this site didn't interact I'm going to break that rule a bit.

I've been having so much fun with Andrew Kramer's work over at Video Copilot.net (http://www.videocopilot.net) with Adobe After Effects that I'll be putting some of the toys I'm playing with for some work related stuff up over here.  I'm including one of my first eforts here - which is a twister in good ol'Rock Springs.  Which - it may seem like picking on Rock Springs but there's something rewarding about inflicting mayhem to my old homestead.  I think anyone who ever had to sit through a high school class or had teen angst has at one time envisioned a meteor, tornado or atomic blast hitting their home town. 

I'm thinking it's a cultural thing - probably more true of men than women, but ask any guy if they ever imagined anything like that and 9 times out of 10 the answers going to be yes.  But since I'm starting out small - this is mostly a paper filled dust devil.  Here's test #3 -

For those wondering - let me just answer the following questions right up front...

1) Yes... this is actually what my old home town looks like.  This is one of the exits off I-80.

2) Yes - it probably IS that windy there all the time and in fact I've seen this kind of dust devil on more than one occasion.

3) Yes it's  still photo I grabbed off the internet. 

I drug my son over to Youtube to check out some of the really bad TV effects we had back in the 80s after watching some of the TV of today and he remarked on how cheesy some of the video effects were.

After a few clips - we got into the discussion of how they're done and I mentioned we had all the toys to do not just the cheesy effects but the relatively good ones you see on tv.  The next thing I know he's got me showing him how to use AfterEffects and some other toys.

Here are a couple clips we tossed out there...

Obviously - we'd want to actually shoot this with "real" video of cars or whatever and this is just the first test of this - but you get the idea.  In the clip below we added that for the KRTS stuff I did a while back.  Both clips were done in less than an hour of my time - actually the clouds/space death ray above took around 20 minutes and the one below was around 10-15 minutes to pull together.

The just goes to show you that yes, with very little creativity you could do some cool effects.  I've decided to actually expand on this and show him how to do them right - and give them a more pro appearance so get used to the clips as we do more this month with them.