Achieving Transparency thru Premiere?

[ACGStudio]

Hi (woo, first post!),

I'm currently in pre-production on a short film, and I was wondering, being new to editing in Adobe Premiere, if there was any way to achieve a transparency effect (that is, layering one shot over another, and have them both running simultaneuously)

See, my movie involves a newly-dead ghost walking around his corpse, and, excluding using identical twins, this would be a hard shot to achieve.

Hope you can help.

[stop_thief]

Yes, definitely...quite easily in fact (relatively).
There's even an option specifically for transparency.
The best way I can think to go about it is by using a blue or green screen.
It's exactly as you mentioned.
You will start with two different takes of the same scene.
One with the dead body, and one with the ghost walking around in front of a completely blue or green background.
In Premiere you will overlay the ghost clip over the body clip, thus having them play simultaneously. That's why there is more than one track for video and audio. It's also part of the reason nonlinear editing is so great. By adjusting the ghost clip's transparency level...using a chroma effect or something that eliminates all traces of a certain color(blue), you will now achieve a solid ghost walking around a dead body. To make the ghost more transparent basically involves experimentation. You might try shining a blue tinted light on the actor, reflecting light off the background, or just messing with the controls in Premiere which could help the effect in post-production.
Read the help file/manual and you'll figure it out.