GREEN.

 This post is not about the ecological nutters thinking they can influence climate. The disciples on the ground I regard as akin to King Canute and Don Quixote. (Spanish. The 'x' is pronounced as an 'h' except in northern Spain where it is said like a guttural softish 'k' a bit like the 'ch' in loch but a tad harder). The ones driving the agenda are unprincipled money grubbing bastards. They all seem to spend their cash on beachfront properties despite preaching rising sea levels or maybe falling sea levels, either way if they believed their nonsense I doubt they would spend millions on a property which will either drown them or leave them looking at miles of sand and rock.

This Green is about green screening, it's what the weather totty stand in front of, whilst they wave their arms about and tell us it's going to piss down harder tomorrow.

I have an idea for a couple of birthday videos. They will have semi transparent animated text on an animated background. I thought a little bird or insect flitting about would add interest. I pinched a couple of free video strips from PixaBay. The bird I have used for this is charming but crap, I suspect it was recorded at 60fps and dumped at 25fps. You will see little black dots following the bugger. Impossible to get rid off without either popping it through Handbrake or manually masking every frame and those days have long gone for me. 

You will see from the video that the little bird isn't on green but flits about on black. The screen can be any colour just as long as the subject doesn't have any bits the same. A Black weather totty could be very entertaining shot against a black screen. I'm surprised the BBC haven't given it a whirl.

The posh film compositors call see through the Alpha channel. You can blend the video layer in lots of ways but alpha over and alpha under would let the little bird pass behind the letter and fly back in front of it in the bit of video. This is what I want and it is going to be very time consuming. Easy frame by frame stuff but boring. I need an apprentice or a slave. I recall seeing a bank of nubile young ladies working away on an advertisement for Fusion editing software. Unfortunately I'm using Blender and as it is free nubile young ladies don't seem to be available. Round here they are noticeable by their absence so a half dozen would be impossible to source, must be lots in Melbourne Australia.  

This is the Blender compositor set up, I have done this stuff before but used Adobe. You can see the little bird I'm masking as I have popped a big highlight round it. There are lots of bits of things to adjust but the important, really important bit is to set up the Render instructions correctly I have put a yellow splodge on them in the panel on the right. File format has to be PNG and the colour channel has to be set to RGBA, it stands for red, green, blue and see through. Guess how I know?

There is not much Blender can't do but I have one major criticism the sliders are far too sensitive so I end up having to enter values. I will let them know and perhaps I could hold down something convenient like Shift and U whilst using my third hand to scroll and left click. Happen I'm just a bit clumsy. Not to worry it's free, useful in the right hands and provides hours of fun.

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