Mimicking Kanye West’s “Homecoming”
Posted by: Sean Smith in Bag of Tricks, Post Production, Final Cut Pro 6A coworker a mine sent me a link to Kanye West’s “Homecoming” video and asked if I could recreate this effect and how easy is it to do. Its nothing complicated and seemed pretty easy. So I pulled open Final Cut and started hackin’ away at footage from a music video shoot here in our studio. All the footage was shot DVCPro HD on the HVX-200 against a green screen.
I keyed out the green, dropped a color matte behind the footage and applied a luma travel matte to the studio footage. This didn’t get me too far. I swapped the two tracks and applied the travel matte to the footage this time…. and Whallla! 
I was seeing the above track matted by the keyed footage below it. However, only the lightest areas of the footage were showing through. I changed to a alpha travel matte. While this completely matted the image based on the outline of the keyed footage, I still wasn’t getting any depth like in Kanye’s video.
Knowing that a luma travel matte working on the idea of brightness (or amount of white) in an image, I decided to add a 3-way color corrector to the studio footage. I then boosted the whites and mids most of the way up. I turned to blacks up slightly as well. Sure enough, there it was. I could throw anything on that top track, set its composite mode to “Travel Matte - Luma” and I’d have the effect. I moved both tracks to V2 and V3 and put another color matte on V1 to recreate the background.
I looked at this composition closely and realized…. I just created the iPod commercial effect. Has apple really been using a technique that was this simple. Granted when Apple does it, they have flying partials, moving cameras and a host of other elements to control, but the base effect was this? Awesome! While the effect can only properly be done by the post people working with Apple, I thought it was pretty sweet to mimic the effect in shop here.
After installing the software there wasn’t a noticeable difference in the performance of the computer, heck there wasn’t even any outward difference in starting FCP, Color or any of the other apps. However, FCP now has more easy setups, and more options under external video monitoring. I connected our 9″ Sony production monitor via the component out (NTSC out) of the card. Instantly, after setting the Video Output in FCP to Intensity NTSC, the monitor showed video. Amazing! Beyond FCP, I then became interested in if Color would also broadcast to this monitor in the same way. I fired up color, and bam! I had an external monitor for color correcting in Color! Sweet! At $350, this card was becoming a GREAT investment.
