[ANSWERED] Is there a simple way of creating a silhouette of a dancer?

Yoshi

Hello.

Is there a simple way of creating a silhouette of a dancer like what we used to see in the iconic iPod commercials? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJTpLtw7vn0&t=5s

I tried a couple of ways as you can see in the attached patch, but I'm certain that some of you know the better ways to do it.

Thank you for your help!

silhouette.izz

DusX

@yoshi

Really there are a number of ways to do this. In the end it comes down to what your input material looks like?
How close are the dancers to background objects? Is the background a solid color or something else? How much control do you have over the lighting?
Current tools like MediaPipe, can be used via Pythoner to use AI to create this masking, and will work with an RGB camera, but will be limited in framerate and resolution by the machine processing the feed. While others options can use different keying methods to mask the dance/background separately. The example given was likely shot on a greenscreen at the time, and had the foreground chromakeyed from the background. Luma key can also be used to separate light and dark, but this will make separation of things like feet on the ground very difficult.
If you are running on PC, and have access to a Kinect V2, my kinect2share software can provide the silhoette as well.

Woland

You can probably also use a normal camera with the Freeze + Difference method in this tutorial: https://troikatronix.com/add-ons/tutorial-basic-motion-tracking/

And which is explained here: https://vjskulpture.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/motion-tracking-in-isadora

But you’ll likely need to use other video actors like Contrast Adjust to make the dancer pure white.

It’s also very lighting dependent, but it works from further away than a Kinect.

Woland