How to insert dynamic data into a produced video

Question

I was wondering if anyone knew the technique or how to place dynamic information into a produced video?

The idea is that you could, say connect to facebook, and then display your friends faces in a movie about missing persons or similar. It's the same principle as the Intel Museum of Me where you grant access to facebook and it creates a gallery of your facebook pictures.

Or similar to this video where you can upload your face into a video, http://vimeo.com/25392805

I've been searching for ages for a method or technique for this but I can't find anything. Searching for "how to insert pictures in video" or "how to load dynamic data into video" doesn't seem to yield the right kinds of results.

Thoughts appreciated.

Answer 1

You should try googling for something like green screen software or chromakey software

There is a wide range of free, cheap and very expensive applications to do this. Some of the free ones actually work okay - depends on your requirements.

Answer 2

If you don't need to do anything too complicated, you might be able to overlay data or photographic elements on video in Adobe Flash (cringe). You'd create a flash object, and send it variables that would control what would be overlaid on it.

An alternative would be to create a script to render a video, and then play that normally. The main trouble with doing something like this is the time it'd take to render the video. Blender for example, has compositing features, and is scriptable using Python - although there'd be a lot to figure out (mostly the framework to interface between Blender and your site).

Answer 3

usualy, this types of tricks are done in flash, video overlayed with your custom data in a separate container.

if you do it offline, you can script after effects with you prepared video, to render the sequences with your custom data in it. Its a trick with coma delimited spaces...excel export to coma delimited, get a script from aescripts and youre good to go!