Bill Myers

A message was recently posted to our discussion board inquiring about Chromakey - a technique used in video production.

Thousands of words could easily be written about the technical why's and wherefore's of Chromakey - but chances are the reader of those words still wouldn't have any idea of what Chromakey was all about.

But if they could just see someone setting up a Chromakey effect, and showing all the interesting ways it could be used, they'd immediately understand how useful (and easy) Chromakey could be.

So rather than writing a long detailed reply to the message, I went through my raw video footage, found a short video clip on showing me using Chromakey, and I loaded that to the web. It took me just a few minutes to dump the video from my digital camcorder to my computer, and another few minutes to convert the video to web format.

You can see the results at http://www.bmyers.com/public/chromakey.wmv or http://www.bmyers.com/public/chromakey.rm

This short clip shows why 'how to' information on video is so valuable. With video (or DVD), you can learn and understand in minutes what might take you weeks (or forever) to learn from books. (Of course, the video on tape or DVD is much clearer than the video clip on the web.)

And for the product developer, producing 'how to' products on DVD and video has another benefit - time savings. As it is often much easier to produce a video or DVD than it is to write a book. (Especially if you've seen a video showing how to do this!)