Text tutorials

Chromanator Tutorials: Chromanator Misc - by Arktic

Ghost trails

The 'ghost trail' effect is usually used to emphasise speed, or to create a creepy or eerie appearance to a character. Using Chromanator, you can replicate this effect with very little hassle.

First of all, you need to isolate your actor/subject, either through extensive use of a garbage matte or by filming your actors against a blue or greenscreen. The blue/greenscreen option is much easier and faster. This is the clip that I'm going to be keying :

I'll use a colour difference key to remove the bluescreen, and then add in a suitable background:

I now need to make a copy of the footage of the actors. I right click on the clip, select “Copy”, and then right click on the layer below, selecting “Paste”. Now I have two of the same clip:

This second clip needs shifting a few frames to the right, so that the trail will be visible. Here I've cropped the end of the shot just to keep everything neat :

This means I have two copies of the actors over of the background :

I have to make this clip look a little more like a ghost trail and less like a clone of the actors, so to do this, set the composite mode to ‘add' under the clip's properties:

Now I need to grade this clip to enhance the ghostly appearance. I can do this by altering the Transparency and Box Blur RGBA of the clip under “Effects” in the object view:

You can alter these to whatever you like, depending upon the style you want your ghost trail to be.

I've set mine to a very low blur (about 2 or 3 percent), and high transparency, which gives me something like this:

I want my trail to fade over time, rather than being constant - so I also need to keyframe the transparency so that the trail fades. This is simply done by having a key frame at the start of the clip set to around 90% transparency, and one at the end set to 100%.

If you wanted a trail that was constant and did not fade away, then leave out the above step.

The effect is starting to look good - but not really like a trail as such. To get that ‘trailing' effect, I need to make multiple copies of the clip I've just been working on, and place them on the timeline, only shifted a little to the right each time:

And you should end up with something like this -