How to create "transparent" videos using AVIedit

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• I have used especially an "flashing" blue background. It is too difficult to cut off because the brightness of blue varies very much both over the time and inside the frame. You must avoid using those backgrounds, or you will get visible artifacts.
• You could increase Tolerance to hide even more blue background. But it will make transparent some other areas, like a girl shoulders, that is poor.
• If you want to use some blue or green cloth as the casting background, make sure you lighted it up in a uniform way, so the all parts have equal brightness and hue.
• Use a bright light when you cast someone, because most cameras will give noisy picture if there is too dark. Even if you have used good colored background, the camera noise can make color keying impossible.
• Combine the fluorescent bulb light with daylight and simple bulb, otherwise you will get noticeable color shifts and destroyed balance of white.

Unlike the using transparent videos, you could add nice still frames to your movies without any special tricks. I have used Paint Shop Pro v. 5 to create such a template (upper image at right). There is a couple of "picture tube" images, I have used Maple leaves. I used bright red background to make separation of leaves easy. Next, I loaded a clip into AVIedit, chose Image as Layer source and selected its red background as chroma key. Hey, it works :) Note, I have created the sample picture before the video compression. This causes the actual clip to be blurred too much.