When the weather is nice during the work week I will head outside for a quick walk around our business park. It’s a pretty standard neighborhood, although we also house the town’s police and fire departments so sometimes it can get loud if there’s an emergency going on somewhere. I’ve been spending time taking videos of various aspects of this neighborhood in the hopes that I could find something to do with them.

Here, I’ve taken a snippet of video from one of these walks, featuring a street and sidewalk, and have replaced the street with a video of my in-laws swimming pool which I recorded this week when we were there for a cookout. Once I had the comp “done”, I lamented the fact that I didn’t record the pool when anyone was in it.

Relevant Resources

Aside from my business park neighborhood and my in-law’s pool, nothing special here.

Relevant Websites

None.

Technical Details

I don’t know how this could get any easier. As usual, it’s not professional grade, but I masked out the street, set it to Subtract, and had to adjust the mask’s Path over the course of the video because there was a slight heave when recording for some reason. With that masked out, I just slipped the pool video behind the street.

The issue, though, is that the mask on the street layer was sharp, so the pool video looked pretty lame. It had no interaction with the street, considering that the pool should look like it’s at street level, which is a few inches below the sidewalk where I was standing. I added a solid black layer on top of the comp and masked out two regions which tapered down in the distance, one for each side of the road. The one closest to the camera looks OK, but the one on the other side of the street looks like it’s trying too hard. I duped the street layer above the original and then masked out the far side of the street to hopefully give it some feather in the hopes that it would gradually segue into the pool scene, but it just ended up looking muddied.