As a user of Trainz through many years I have been thinking of making a merged combination of Trainz and video. Having a big affection to Greece - to the Island Kalymnos just outside Kos, I sat down with local maps and planned a fictitious railroad network to ease the communication on this Greek beautiful place. In my Greek apartment I have a computer installation (Win 7) with Trainz 2010, and the Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5 (yes, proper licensed).
Using my professional Sony video camera I used three days to travel around on a rented moped, filming footage to be used on the planned railway video. The technique to be used to merge video and Trainz were as follows:
All original video sequences were motion stabilized through the warp function in an added software pack to Premiere Pro - this is done to make sure that no relative movements took place between the original video and the Trainz video sequences.
Using (yes, licensed) FRAPS I constructed a big number of small Trainz routes with layout coinciding with the original footage, in terms of angles, distances, curves, tunnels etc. All the Trainz routes used blue or green background only, such that using a so called blue/green keying effect it would be possible to extract only the rails and the train movements.
In the original footage, I wanted to put the Trainz videos inside the footage, such that you can see both the foreground and the backgrounds as live video. To do this, Photoshop Elements was a good helper, to make exact masks based on still pictures from the footage scenes. After some tweaking I made 2 - two video files from every footage video scene - one representing the background, and one the foreground with green areas where the background should be located. Then, combining (from track 3 in Premiere Pro): Background, Trainz sequence and foreground using keying in Premiere Pro, the complete scene was rendered.
And this is just the beginning - planning the whole movie in detail is essential - writing the shooting manuscript, choosing the rolling materials, writing a voice-over manuscript (original in English), choosing available music, and finding people to read the English version, translate the manuscript to Greek. And finally - the most important issue: all copyright owners must give their written permissions to use their work, like Google, NASA, copyright of the used Greek maps, music ..... All parties gave their permissions - the only demand from TERRAIN - the Greek map company, was to get two train tickets. They got them, send together with a special DVD!
Yes, the final release of the video was in local Greek TV in October, and the video has been released to YouTube in English, Greek and Norwegian versions.
Do you want to have a look? Here is the English version (links to the other languages are on YouTube):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MIiMFjd91M
Happy Trainzing! Best regards Tore, user torol on Trainz
Using my professional Sony video camera I used three days to travel around on a rented moped, filming footage to be used on the planned railway video. The technique to be used to merge video and Trainz were as follows:
All original video sequences were motion stabilized through the warp function in an added software pack to Premiere Pro - this is done to make sure that no relative movements took place between the original video and the Trainz video sequences.
Using (yes, licensed) FRAPS I constructed a big number of small Trainz routes with layout coinciding with the original footage, in terms of angles, distances, curves, tunnels etc. All the Trainz routes used blue or green background only, such that using a so called blue/green keying effect it would be possible to extract only the rails and the train movements.
In the original footage, I wanted to put the Trainz videos inside the footage, such that you can see both the foreground and the backgrounds as live video. To do this, Photoshop Elements was a good helper, to make exact masks based on still pictures from the footage scenes. After some tweaking I made 2 - two video files from every footage video scene - one representing the background, and one the foreground with green areas where the background should be located. Then, combining (from track 3 in Premiere Pro): Background, Trainz sequence and foreground using keying in Premiere Pro, the complete scene was rendered.
And this is just the beginning - planning the whole movie in detail is essential - writing the shooting manuscript, choosing the rolling materials, writing a voice-over manuscript (original in English), choosing available music, and finding people to read the English version, translate the manuscript to Greek. And finally - the most important issue: all copyright owners must give their written permissions to use their work, like Google, NASA, copyright of the used Greek maps, music ..... All parties gave their permissions - the only demand from TERRAIN - the Greek map company, was to get two train tickets. They got them, send together with a special DVD!
Yes, the final release of the video was in local Greek TV in October, and the video has been released to YouTube in English, Greek and Norwegian versions.
Do you want to have a look? Here is the English version (links to the other languages are on YouTube):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MIiMFjd91M
Happy Trainzing! Best regards Tore, user torol on Trainz
