stupid moviemaker

It's no news to me that Windows Movie Maker is not precisely a robust video editor. It's serviceable, if what you want is simple compositing, and I could probably do most of what I want with it, but one thing I'd hoped to do that I just tested turns out to be impractical... partly because of WMM's limitations and partly because of Sims lighting.

See, WMM will do chromakeying to an arbitrary value, but it's to an arbitrary precise value, e.g., setting it to RGB 0xf0f090 will not catch anything that's 0xf0f095 or anything else but that precise value. And the Sims doesn't light anything completely evenly. I imagine I could, given time, figure out a way to force it to, but at the moment I can't see a way to do it. So when you film against a solid colour, what you're actually getting is a colour that varies slightly across the surface. Not really a problem if I could have flexible chromakeying, but it decidedly doesn't work for an arbitrary value.

Now, I could use WMM to chroma against a much less strict-of-hue bluescreen, but there's one problem: several of the things I wanted to chromakey involve people who dress in something blueish... and no, I really can't change that, for reasons that will be clear later. (And, among other things, one person's hair is blue.) Heck, even lavender got caught in places. I think that the variety of blue available is mutable, but I can't make it exclude too much blue or it'll be the same problem all over again, and I don't think I can find a point between "pure blue" and "the blue of this one person" that will work in any event, see aforementioned notes about lighting.

So... basically I'm now at a point where I either can a) rework the shots I wanted to chroma to work with whatever in-game background or b) eliminate them entirely and show the same thing another way, or c) download a trial version of Sony Vegas and see if I can get all my compositing done before the trial period runs out, and even that might not solve things because I'm not sure how flexible its chromakeying is (it's supposed to be pretty flexible but until I try it I can't be sure).

While I'm half inclined to c) because I'd really like to do this the way I originally planned, to be honest it would push back the non-video stuff quite a bit and I don't want to do that... I'm already behind where I meant to be because of the CC problems I had. Chances are that's going to leave me with a mix of a) and b). I think that in the case of the one scene, I can do mostly a) with a bit of b); the result won't be as nice as it could've been with bluescreen I don't think but I think I have a way to do it that'll work out. In the case of the other one, well, I have a couple ideas, one of which involves using the precise-value chroma with a series of stills instead.

Anyhow. None of this is getting any buildings built, so back to that.