Surprising Seethrough Screen

11:23 am, November 14th, 2005,

Watch this fun video of a transparent PowerBook screen.

At first the PowerBook looks like it’s displaying a regular “transparent desktop,” made by snapping a pic of the scene behind the computer and displaying it onscreen, giving the impression the LCD is transparent.

But then the PowerBook is picked up and the background stays stationary in space — just as though it would if the screen were truly transparent. It’s a really convincing illusion.

The clip was made by Jose Izquierdo of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and he explains how he did it after the link:

Jose writes:

My video was done using a simple technique.

I set up my DV camera on its tripod facing the desk, recorded a couple of minutes worth of footage of the desk without the PowerBook on it. Then I changed the wallpaper of the PowerBook so it was of color GREEN. I placed the PowerBook on the desk and moved it around, opened and closed some windows and voila.

Later on I imported all the footage onto FinalCut Pro and layered a background plate (desk without powerbook) below the foreground (video of the powerbook) and with the built in “Chroma Key” filter, I keyed out the green portions of the screen so the layer with the desk video would show up.

It was a really simple trick.

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