A myriad of masking/matte problems in Premiere...

[Second Element]

Okay, I've had several different ideas for how to get this to work- and just about every one has failed so far when I experiment with them. I think I am mixing up the different approaches with the wrong ways of executing them.

Basically, we have a scene of a character holding a mirror. Instead of her reflection in the mirror, I wanted to show different scenes. Normally for this kind of thing, I would just make a master overlay frame in Premiere with a hole cut out in the mirror, making it transparent, and overlaying it over the footage I want to show through only the mirror. However, the stupid water dish near the mirror is animated- as well as light bouncing off the figure and and background because of a lit candle- and I thought it would look weird to halt all the moving light animation in this scene all of a sudden. So I thought instead, I would do a "green screen" of just the surface of the mirror, and then skew the footage as I need and put it in the mirror.

I made the mirror's surface in Photoshop and made it, effectively, a bright green, since that color isn't found in this scene. However, I feel like I am crossing wires here, because I tried using it as an image matte. But that doesn't work, because the mirror then loses the transparency around it, so now I've got a green circle that plays footage, but you can't see the original background behind it anymore ( ie. the woman, the water dish, etc. ) I think I am supposed to be doing something different, like instead, taking the footage that is supposed to appear in the mirror and altering it and making it supposed to play just in the bright green areas of the scene ( which would be the stupid mirror )

I'm attaching an image of what the scene looks like, so anyone who is willing to help out my fool self might get a better idea of what I'm talking about.

Thanks everyone.

<img src="http://www.second-element.com/mirror.jpg">

[Zaphod_Beeblebrox]

I can think of two ways round this, from what you've said:

One would be the easy way out, and just make a still image (such as the one you linked) from an appropriate frame of the scene and use simple masking to take out the mirror.

OR

You could use a chroma transparency in premiere on your 'green screen' version, and mask the green, that (with maybe some adjustment to the settings), should do the job well...

If anyone more versed in working with transparencies wants to overrule me, please do so, i'm not exactly sure...

[gangstaj8]

I'm still learning this stuff myself, so I couldn't begin to give you a detailed step-by-step instruction, but I would suggest looking into the Track Matte feature. If I understand what you're trying to accomplish, you'll need to make a matte in Photoshop, or whatever basic image editor you use, that has the circle for that miror as black, and the rest of the image as white (or it could be vice versa). Import that into Premiere, and put it into Video 3. Have your background video (the character, the water dish, etc...) in Video 1. Then place the video that you want to show through (superimpose?) into Video 2. Set the transperancy key on Video 2 for Track Matte, and on Video 3 for Alpah Channel (mine chose this automatically when I setup Video 2). Read up a little bit on it in your help file, then play around a bit. Hope this helps, good luck.

[Second Element]

Solved it ^_^x

Thanks much for your helpful comments- that's what got me there ^_~x