Green screen Keying

Hey everyone, it's a new day, and it's a new video. Not new for you, not a new day at least. You're watching it in probably a nice long series. But now, I'm good and caffeined up, and ready for another video.

In this one we're going to look at Green Screen, or Keying. Essentially just showing in green, anything. Could be people or objects against a green screen background. And then, removing it. So that you got kind of a mask, and you can put them anywhere. Let's look at it. So, in my project window here, I'm going to double click. I am going to go to 'Green Screen', bring this one in. And we're going to make a 'Comp' from it. Right click. 'New Comp from Selection'. Hit space bar.

You can see, a new day, my computer is running a whole lot better. Or fuller, even. And you can see, there's my hip hop man. And he's been set against a green screen. Now, this green screen's particularly good. What happens is, when you're setting against a green screen we can fix it now, in After Effects, like the last 20%, but if you got a really bad green screen, it can be impossible to go through and cut things out, you might have to look at something like Rotoscoping, which we're going to do later on in this video series. It's all about setting up the green screen. Spend the whole day doing the green screen otherwise you'll spend the next 4 days trying to cut out the person because it's a really bad green screen.

Now, how to do it? The best thing to do is making sure it's lit. So, this person here needs to be far and off away from the green screen at the back so that there is a bit of a distance between the two. That's another good thing, so there's no shadow cast onto it. Another good thing you can do is to make sure that the background is lit. By lit I mean there's some light kind of lighting him and you can see there's a strong light on the side here but actually have more lights in the background, this green thing. If you lined it up nice and bright it ends up getting a nice consistent color and makes it really easy to key later on. Folds,

I've seen people ironing their green screens Say it's a fabric one, they've ironed it, and playing around. What ends up happening is, it's a lot easier to maybe, just to really light it up, rather than spend the day ironing all the creases out. The other thing you can do to make it a little bit easier is that, use a lens, if you are a photographer and you have access to a couple of lenses is to have something with a really shallow depth feel so that this hip hop artist is in good sharp focus. But then it falls off, and it's quite bleary in the background. That helps kind of blend this nice green area here.

So let's say that we've got our green screen shot and it's reasonably good. All we need to do is, over here, in 'Effects & Presets' you might have to go to 'Window Effects & Presets' to open it up. There's a couple of different effects in here. Most people, including me, use 'Keylight'. There’s one in here called 'Keylight'. And all you do is click, hold, drag it on. Nothing happens, except we've got our keylight effect over here and all you need to do is grab the 'Eye dropper' tool. Click once in the background, pick the green. And, hey presto we got our background gone. Now, this one here is -- yes, great green screen, okay.

Now if yours is pretty bad you might have to then go through and start playing around. Start playing around with the different keylight effects. Now, the thing to start with is under 'Matte' Down here, under 'Screen Matte'. This has the most effect on the [green ??00:03:29] screen. So if you've got kind of a-- it's green mostly, and there's a little bit of shadow or little bit change of colors, then you can play around with this. It's either 'Clip Black' or 'White'. Just kind of work away with this, we'll start with this one. Ours is good, so we're kind of making ours worse but I'm giving it to you for instance. I guess start at 0, go left, and right and just see whether this fixes it up or not. Same with the white. It's at a 100 at the moment, you can lower it down. And you can see there, because it's so consistent it's all right, but you can see there's a bit of adjustment in that one as well. You can slowly work your way through this list.

One of the big ones I guess is if you've got a bit of ghosting around the outside, like a bit of a green halo, it's this one here, it's quite nice, this 'Grow/Shrink'. Watch this, I can move the edges out. So there's a halo, and move it a little bit, just to tighten it in a little bit. So I like this. Perfect. So you can just work your way through this list. If it's terrible, you're going to have to go and mask some stuff. There's a masking tutorial further on in this course. So now that we've got this guy masked, let's put him on a background.

On a black background, don't sweat it. If your mask isn't great and there's a bit of edges, and it's not great, is to make sure he's against-- Say our dancer here is against the background, he's actually going to finish on, rather than black, Black is, it's the hardest of all things to mask against because it's really tough. So what you can do is, actually just stick him against the background, so I'll go back to my 'Project' window. Double click in here, and I'm going to use the particle thing we used earlier, 'Particular Background'. Here we go.

I'm going to put this in underneath. I just clicked, held, and dragged it underneath. And there we go. Make sure you're working against the background because you might have found that, against black there's a few art effects, and things that aren't working but against the actual background you might find like, you can't see anything. So there's no point spending the whole day doing the green screen when potentially well, you can see there, that's a better green screen. Can you see, it's not-- a bit of-- I guess probably that's because I was messing around with the settings there.

So we're going to back in to-- click on this layer. Let's go to 'Effects Controls', let's have a look in here. What I might do is put that back to 0, is that it? No. I'll put him back, I liked him, 1.6. And now we're going to do just some slight editing. It's not you, it's the blacks. Here we go, can you see the difference there? You might-- If you're watching the video in lower res you might not be able to see it, but there's a bit of cloudiness either side here. So, 'Black', we're just going to lift that up a little bit. And that's kind of tucked it away nicely.

Next thing we're going to do is, just while we're here, we've finished keying now, we're going to make it against the nice background. I'm going to put the resolution down to 'Third' so it plays a bit nicer. There he goes, particles falling. We're going to play around with hue and saturation. Just type in 'hue' in our effects. There's one called 'Hue/Saturation', drag it on to the right layer, the 'particles'. And I'm just going to go where it says 'Hue', and I'm going to drag this around. You can drag the dialler, it's probably easier. I'm just trying to do the background so it's not green. Everything I do is green and gray. Back to green, out of green. He is our hip hop man on a really pink background there. Nice!

All right, let's save this one. I'll see you in the next video.