Premier & Photoshop Effects

[Teh_Meck]

Hi, i have adobe premier elements 7 and photoshop CS3, as well as Flash CS3
there are two things that i need help with.
in Premier: I want to be able to merge two videos together. As in, i want to take two videos with the exact same camera angle and setup, but with different foreground action. and then i want to merge them together so it looks as if both things are happening at the same time. (im taking two videos of myself)

and in photoshop/Flash/Premier/ any other proogram, i want to be able to replace the face of a person with something else in a video, while they are moving.

i would like help with the first one firstly, as it is more important to me right now.
Thanks,
Teh_Meck (Analog)

[zuluclayman]

Both are reasonably difficult to do well - they will rely on a lot of patience and time

For the first one - the best way I can think of to do this would be to use a solid colour background for one of the videos and chroma key it out so that the figure (you) can be placed on a higher track in Premiere than the other one then chroma keyed so the background drops out revealing the other track underneath.
Some things to be aware of when chroma keying:
* lighting must be very even otherwise shadows (creases, folds in whatever material you use) will not be taken out with the background.
* you must not have any of the colour used in the background on you (including skin colour. Green and blue are the normal chroma keying colours used because you don't have greens and blues in your skin tones and can wear colours other than them - chroma keying works by deleting ALL of the chosen colour!
When using the chroma key effect you can use the slider for selecting the tolerance or similarity of colour taken - just try it out and see what setting you need.

There are any number of greenscreening/chroma keying tutorials on Youtube and other sites - let Google be your friend

[zuluclayman]

The second of your requests is harder - what you would have to do is use key framing to move the position of the object you replace the head with. Basically what you would be doing is creating a track for the object to follow by inserting a key frame every few frames to tell it where to move the object to.
The process is too long to describe here - best bet would be to look up tutorials on Youtube if you like to see how to do things or the Adobe forums, Elements Village forums or just do a Google search if you don't mind reading instructions and following them.

Photoshop would not be an option unless you have many many hours to spend on repetitive tasks - you would have to use a frame grabber to get a still of all the frames and then use Photoshop to replace the head (that's the easy part) in each frame - this could be thousands of images! Then you would be able to use Flash or Premiere to make them into a movie again - stop motion in effect.

Adobe After Effects would allow you to do both these a little more easily but is very expensive

Good Luck with both

[Teh_Meck]

Thanks alot!
thats actually great because i have two roms in my house, one geen screen colour, and one blue screen colour. And also thanks for the help on the other problem.
but how am i supposed to make sure that both me's dont collide with each other?
intense planning?

[zuluclayman]

yup - intense planning - you could put some masking tape x's on the floor so you know where to stop etc. stage plays, TV studios, choreographers for dance all use that technique.

[Teh_Meck]

Thanks again!
great idea.