🔥 Ultimate Green Screen Tutorial | Crazy Advanced Keying Techniques

hey guys Linden here from visionary universe today we're going to be doing something pretty iconic and that's keying out green screens so King is one of the first things you start learning because like I said it's a very iconic Hollywood compositing technique and it's a really clever way of isolating or since row doing selective sections of your screen allowing you no flexible compositing as the artist sees fit so green screening is very revolutionary for visual effects and movie magic so I don't know this may be somewhat of a far-fetched idea but my goal with this video is to make it the best most informative knowledge compacted technique rich keen video up-to-date so really you know done more research and carefully put this episode together to possibly reach that goal so I've actually written down a huge list of all kind of King techniques and stuff so hopefully we can cover all those today I've actually got so much more want to talk about but of course we don't want make this video too long so you know this video is definitely going to be a journey so stay tuned keep watching all that good stuff so I want to start off here with a little bit of cool knowledge and this is probably something that everyone has wondered in their own minds before and probably figured it out but you know why is it that we use green screens and basically the answer essentially is because green on average is the least most common color you'll find in any standard object and I have a little experiment here that kind of tests that out so basically this is just like a bunch of object here just random objects just put together and we're going to see kind of what the average color is here but just kind of took out the whites and some of the blacks fast blur together turned up the opacity and blended it together so I'm kind of getting the average color here so this is what we're going to do this is kind of the average color we can turn up the saturation if we need to this is the this is the average color basically you're gonna find in objects kind of a reddish orangish brownish even some magenta in there so basically we want the screen to be as far from that as possible it needs to be the opposite color so that when we take out the green screen it won't take out the subject or the foreground so let's invert it we're going to invert this to see what color that green screen should be on average it should be about a green so it kind of a cyan --is-- green screen and we can even use a color controller just kind of choose this color to see where it lies on the color palette so you can see here that's pretty close to cyan here it's kind of greenish sign on average I did several tests like even more tests and on average it came out with this about the same hue right there and this is actually example of just other objects and then we have another one of like clothes um it also depends on how we invert it if we invert the red green and blue then we get more of a bluish color and that's probably more accurate so we can see that the opposite of the standard colors are bluish green and cyan more of that color so we can kind of look at this color here that's why we want the green screen to be anywhere from blue maybe even cyan or it to green and I'll go ahead and tell you one advantage actually blue does have over green and that is the fact that blue is more opposite to skin color like I have an example here there's like some skin a lot brown colors and that's why I use a blue screen because it's more opposite and make it easier in post so I could go and show you if you invert it it's kind of a blue color so blue is actually more the opposite you know I haven't dealt with very many blue screens even though theoretically they seem to work pretty well but you know I'm going to go ahead and tell you 90% of the time on average green screens do the trick so the first thing I wanna point out a lot of people when they do tutorials it's not really fair because they have like this perfect literally just a green solid but anyway it's like a perfect little though I am I teach you how to do a chroma key and they just add it and just key what we're done yeah so easy you know and it's not really fair because you know a lot of times the viewer may have you know a more challenge may have not quite so perfect green screen so like I always say you want to go for the worst case scenario and that allows room for a lot of techniques because it's not always going to be perfect and with the keys not so good you went to Tori's you gotta bring out these challenges so we're today when this video we have some pretty challenging clips that we're gonna learn a lot techniques we're dealing with a lot of this hair and when it's not such a perfect example because I'm sure for a lot of us it isn't so perfect alright so sorry it took so long to get to the actual tutorial but we're gonna get started now so let's go ahead and remove all this stuff let's go ahead start with this example because it is a nice example so the first step is to limit the range of colors that you have to key out and that's very important because see if these dark colors over here think about it we're have to turn up the amount pixels it removes and if these colors are the same colors of these transparent hairs that's going to remove that hair and attempts to remove all the green screen but if we remove that previously we could have a nicer key let me show you what I mean and and how we're going to do this is create a simple garbage mask so go ahead and grab your pen tool select the footage grab a pen tool and just go ahead and start masking around the subject and you'll suppose the subject does move out of the garbage mask well what you can actually do is add keyframes so click the footage and hit em and we'll open the mask property add a keyframe put it like you wanted at certain point in time move to another point in time and just move it exactly how you want and then we'll add two keyframes so it'll move from one position to the other so your garbage mask won't chop out some of your subject so and the garbage mass is very important like I'm saying cause it's going to limit the colors that we have to remove it hopes to preserve as much of the foreground as possible that being said let's go ahead and click on our footage apply the key light effect so basically you can go up here to effect King key light but it's easier just to type it in right here so I always type in my effects right here so key light so let's go and apply this to our footage so with your footage selected double click there we go let's go in hide mask and by the way a cool technique what you can do actually it just click this mask when right here and I'll hide all your masks and if you wanna hide everything hit ctrl shift H and if you wanna bring it back hit control shift H it'll toggle between the two all right so let's go ahead and hide mask like this and then what we're gonna do is grab this eyedropper tool on the key light effect make sure that your footage is selected click the eyedropper tool and hit the green screen alright so most of you probably know that if you're beginner probably not but that's that's the basic thing that we're going to do so you can toggle between their transparency grid in case you have some dark hair that you can't see or not but what we're actually going to do is we're going to more perfectly view our map so there's two ways to do this what you can do is actually go to the screen matte and the key light view option or you have a better option to go down here to this RGB button right here and then choose alpha so and the reason why this is better than screen matte is because this right here accounts for all the effects and the key light screen matte just counts for the key light effect so I may have mentioned this but never leave your view on final so then the final thought and go to intermediate results so you can see here that we can perfectly view what has been keyed out and what has not been keyed out all right obviously it's it's pretty self-explanatory that the gray areas are semi-transparent and the white areas are fully opaque and then the black areas are keyed out and on a very basic level of understanding you know that we don't want that this transparent areas where the green screen is because nothing's supposed to be there so the first thing we can change is our screen gain so we can turn this up just barely I wouldn't recommend turning this up much at all so possibly 103 105 probably not more than 115 depending on your situation so here I'm going to go about 105 the second thing we want to mess with is the screen balance so when we shift this you can see what happens just things change a little bit and basically what it's doing is actually changing the color of your screen a lot of times this just works better so changing the screen balance essentially is just changing the actual color of your key so if we change this more towards the blue it's the same exact thing is changing the screen balance to a lower value so it's just changing the hue of the color selected as all screen balance is doing and you can just adjust this to whatever you think fits to your key most appropriately usually I find that turn the screen balance down helps but that's just because usually my green screen is a little more on the blue side instead of towards the yellow side so if your screen green screen is a little more yellow you might want to turn your screen balance up and if it's more blue you want to turn it down a little bit I'm gonna go for about 35 I think that works best for this particular case so you can see how this key is actually pretty good we don't have much um we don't have much semi-transparent areas over here but basically we want to get rid of those we want to be very careful with this part because when we get rid of this we might actually get rid of some of this so we want to be very careful to only remove this without removing any of our other transparent areas so let's go ahead and go down here to screen mat and this is basically the only other setting we need to mess with in the key light effect basically what we're going to do is we're going to clip the black and what you can do is just slowly increase the clip black and that's just going to get rid of some of those dark grey areas so if we barely increase this just enough it clipped all that trim those transparent areas out but over here it didn't clip much of this at because we very subtly changed about you so maybe we can go something like eight slits so that we won't remove so much of this hair and if there's some transparency on your foreground you want to turn down the clip white so it gets rid of those gray areas on your subject because you don't want your subject to be transparent so this example right here is actually better because you can see that our subject actually has some transparent areas inside of him so if we turn down that clip white or just contrast that so those transparent areas will now be fully opaque there we go we just turned this clip white value down so our subject will not be transparent and making like I said we can clip the black to make sure the background is completely transparent but you want to be very careful with these values so we don't clip the areas actually need to be transparent now I'm going to show you something cool there's something kind of cool clipping the black and white values is actually the same as the Alpha property on the curves effect so if you go add a curves effect and go to the Alpha settings you can actually more dynamically adjust the opacity ranges with this curves effect because you can mess with any level of opacity and basically clipping it is just like moving the bottom part of the curve down so just clipping the the transparent values so if there's ever a case where the white and black is not doing the trick you have more flexibility when you use this curve fit because you can adjust any level of opacity but anyway I'm eight ninety-five percent of time this clip black and white will work so let's go ahead and do about eight and then we'll do this about 95 so we can actually go back to our RBG I see the original clip and it looks pretty good you can turn on our transparency grid so let's looking pretty good I mean hairs don't look the best it looked kind of grainy and we're going to work on that but this is actually a really good key so far and this is one of the easier examples because I'm going to show other harder examples where it's going to be a little more tricky to get this perfect result also while we're at it I want to show you how to understand this status view so you can click view a new status it's going to show this more of a little more of a strange strange setup and basically this just shows you where there are transparent areas all right so even if it's just slightly slightly opaque it's going to do completely grey to show you that there's transparent areas there so you can actually get a more clear view of what areas actually are transparent to any degree and then we can adjust those settings appropriately we only want the great to be where they're supposed to be transparent areas like here is not supposed to be transparent areas over here but if you go to the screen Matt you can see ok well it's just it's barely opaque so I'll just leave it be even though even though the stats you can see that there actually is information there but if it's not harming anything we can leave that the slightly opaque pixels there because it's not hurting anything also when you finish with your key you want to make sure and go through several frames to make sure it looks good with all the frames and not just one frame because you know your green screen could change the lighting can change a little bit the angle could change you know different pixels will be in different places so you want to make sure and go into different places in your footage to make sure that the key works properly now if it does change you make a change your settings where it works with uh both frames but you also want to consider the fact that you can actually keyframe all of these controls slice it for example the screen gain you can get a keyframe here go forward into your footage for it in time and if you want to turn up the screen gain you can do that just turn it up and now it'll be different different places hit you to see your keyframes and basically what happened is over time your screen grain will increase because you add those keyframes so be aware that you can add keyframes to the screen game even screen color everything to make sure it fits every single frame now here is like the second most important thing you can do when king alright and adding a key cleaner effect it's so wonderful let's go to the effects and presets and type in key cleaner and it's two words key cleaner and basically just drag you this onto your footage after the key light effect and basically it's going to search for those edges and pretty much find them it's going to find the proper edges of your footage so let's go and look at before and after it smooth it out and just found those agent works so nicely the key cleaner I'm so impressed that's perfect adding that key cleaner effect and I'm in After Effects CC so I'm not actually sure when they added the key cleaner effect so you can look that up and see but it's a very nice effect but if you're stuck with one of the old CS After Effects version the Creative Suite After Effects you will need to consider updating to CC because there's a lot of features that they added um there's a lot of X plugins and features that they add it to the new actor effects and it really really is helpful so definitely consider updating to the CC and if for nothing else do it for this key cleaner fit because the key cleaner effect is so amazing for your keys so firstly we can increase the additional edge rays to show what it's going to examine how far it's going to search for Edge's so if we turn it up a lot that's going to search with a further radius for you know details and edges so we want to keep this probably about anywhere from five to twenty maybe something like twelve I'm going to about twelve and that's going to work nicely for this effect and then we can even do things like increase the Alpha contrast which is going to sharpen the edge and a lot of times like leave this down to a very low value if not zero and then we can increase the strength if you don't like the effect so much you can turn down the strength so we're going to 100% because it looks really sweet and here's the last thing I mentioned this reduce reduced chatter feature is very nice so basically have you ever seen your keys like Google like you play and then just like googling around and that that's not fun when your keys do that so annoying but when you click this reduce chatter it gets rid of that and we're exactly very and very impressively because it it gets rid of all that the key is googling around stuff like that very annoying but this reduced chatter feature gets rid of that so it's very amazing so I'm very impressed with this key cleaner effect so be sure to add that to your key you know and we can look at this key so far and it's looking so perfect I mean look at that look at the hair how much detail we actually preserve from that hair and everything looking good now here's the third problem the third problem is that there's a little bit of green a little bit of green spill it's called spill and basically there's several ways to get rid of this but the easiest way is to add a advanced spill suppressor so here in the King section we have advanced spill suppressor does the trick wonderfully if you're in the method standard it completely text the color that you keyed out and just gets rid of all that green so wonderfully now we have two options here we can go either to the standard or ultra now a lot of times the electro works better I'm gonna cost you an example why so one kind of turn the brassy we can see that ultra is actually brighter than standard when we have standard darkens and ultra it brightens just least the same amount of brightness and and sometimes it looks good when you darken it other times it can be bad I'm gonna show you why because sometimes when it darkens green areas it has like kind of effect kind of like this and I mean not nearly this element but it looks something kinda like this when it darkens sometimes so you want to be careful using standards so if you see some kind of bad artifacts like this when it darkens then make sure go to ultra and also not very often at all not very often but some time standards could have a little bit of glitches in it so just be careful that in this case I'll probably use standard so what actually did here was turn the exposure up over here and that's actually a nice feature I turn the exposure up over here just kind of see things so be aware of that feature now sometimes you have these these kind of harsh dark edges and that's and that's really not fun to have there's actually a pretty nice way to get rid of this and it works so awesome let me go and show you what it is if you go to your effects and presets right here and search in refine choose refine hard map basically you don't want any of these features turn the feather to zero contrast zero H Sub Zero reduce shatter sometimes you met once about reduced shatter but for now zero you might want some times when that motion blur if there's a fast action scene the motion blur actually helps a lot of times but in this case we're not we don't want any motion blur but what we want is this dominate edge colors look what it did look how wonderfully it got rid of that harsh edge and does that everywhere and sometimes it works so well that we don't even need to use advanced spill suppressor the refine hard mat can actually get rid of those green colors around the edges now if there's green colors on the face or something you want to use that advanced spill suppressor but in this example the only green colors was actually on the edge and the refine hard mat actually fixed those colors around the edge so I'm I'm definitely impressed with this dominate edge colors works works nice for getting rid of those harsh edges and I'm sure a lot of people struggle with that not knowing how to get rid of it but that's refine hard matte awesome technique hope you find use in that because it really is useful you can actually view where it's fixing right here where these white places are where it's fixing the colors and you just check that box there to see what it's doing and also we have this increased domination domination radius I think it was a domination radius we can just increase that so it'll examine more areas but we need to leave this alone because it's working good as it is now you know and the more more it has to examine the Harvick's going to be on your system so if you don't if you don't need to increase this don't do it so it can render faster so this this is massively impressive look how amazing this key is let's take a little preview so take a look at this look how beautifully consistent there's no like I said googling artifacts or details like that at perfectly smooth and we just we have no edge chatter it's so awesome and you're actually seeing the very worst of this because we have this dark hair against the white transparent background and then the final composite will actually look a lot better than this um but with the you know with the black against white those you know those errors really stand out there's not really much errors to stand out because this is working so flawlessly so I hope you've enjoyed this technique so far but we've got so much more cover so let's go ahead and continue to the next example so this is our second example and actually in the first we didn't cover that made techniques is more of a introduction the King showing those who don't have much experience just to getting the basic key down but this one I got I got a lot of techniques to cover that in the previous example so we're gonna be shooting out techniques like crazy let's go and get started obviously the first thing we need to do is add that garbage mask the first piece of advice to have with adding garbage masks is to have a lot lives long tangents she's going to really adjust it without very many keyframe point so it'll be kind of easy to fix new move around so obviously your screen is probably going to move around so you got a keyframe hit em add keyframe to that mask path go to the end you know just move this around double click on your mask open that little transform thing and then we can just you know adjust those tangents like I said without having to move very many points so we have those long tangents there we go so this should be pretty easy nothing much to this alright so we have three keyframe that probably should work let's go ahead and go to this example right here I guess so there's a lot of different colors and shades in this example and you know the garbage match really help with removing a lot of unwanted colors there are a lot of times you can't add a garbage mess that that big of a garbage mask if somebody's moving around mayor's in with fight scene or something and you can't really do a garbage matte so it doesn't really work so let's pretend we can't do such a tight garbage mask so let me go and expand it just you know for worst-case scenario right so let's go ahead and add our first key light effect go to the effects and presets add the key light to the footage all right now let's go ahead and choose and basically when you choose the color you want to choose one of the less saturated colors alright because if you choose the saturated ones it's going to key out those but it's going to leave behind the D saturated but if you keep out the desaturate then it's going to take the saturated ones with it alright so I'm going to choose something maybe like this because it's more of the D saturated greens let's go and take a look at what we have so far so I may have mentioned this before in the previous example but never leave your view on final result so then the foundress up and go to intermediate result because I'm going to tell you why because final result changes your colors and if you're using final result you can't use any effects after it completely changes the color it gets rid of your alpha information never use final result alright good intermediate result intermediate only changes the opacity of the pixels it doesn't mess with the colors and all that stuff so let's go ahead and click down here go to alpha and you can see here we have a key now what we're going to do is basically just turn the screen gain out and what we're going to do is basically create our own garbage mask that's going to be a lot better check this out good screen Matt just turn the black up doesn't know me too careful of this and create turn the clip white down basically what I'm going to do is go to the screen shrink grow and turn this to a positive value the basically it's going to we're going to create that garbage mess and the garbage master is going to very closely surround our character basically it's just a garbage mask that stays very close around the speaker so if they're doing some of my fight scene adding keyframes this mask and stuff this is going to give us a lot less pixel decay out so we can be more careful with with how much we take out to preserve the foreground so so that technique right there is super helpful let me go ahead and show you another one a lot of times you have these dark ugly wrinkles in your screen and there's a very very nice way to fix that let's add a shadow and highlight effect now this is like one of my favorite effects of all times it's actually better than I originally thought was it does something pretty complicated what it does is it brightens the dark areas not the dark pixels you can play around with this but it's really sweet basically going to uncheck Auto amounts and bit and that's going to really brighten up those dark areas it's going to get before-and-after so it might be kind of hard to see but the shadow and how it really does help your keys so you want to apply it before the key light so key light can utilize those advantages you can also mess with the high light amount but I don't see any highlights in the green screen so we'll probably not turn this more than 15 and turn this down prior a little bit it's probably 35 now when we apply a key light it's really going to help out with keying out those dark areas the problem is that it does suppose you don't want your foreground colors to be affected by the shadow and highlight suppose you know it does help your key but you don't like the foreground colors even though shadow highlight does make your foreground look a lot better a lot of times but suppose you don't like this advantage we're going to fix that later on so don't worry about that all right so we went over a way to brighten those dark areas with the shadow and highlight effect and work really nice but I'm going to show you a way you can take this even further what we're going to do is we're going to add go to the effects and presets and add an invert effect so just have an invert so we'll apply this make sure apply it before the key light effect because we're going to add some advantages and we want key light to be able to use those advantages to make a better key so what we're going to do is go to invert Channel we're not we're not going to do RGB we're going to go to lightness all right so light it's going to invert the lightness and leave the color the hue the same but it's going to invert the brightness or lightness so what we're going to do is we're going to go to the blend with original and just blend with about 50% all right so basically what this does it makes every single color the same amount of brightness because it inverts it and then it blends with the original so it meets in the middle so every single color is the same amount of brightness no matter where you go on this picture so you can see what we did here well there were dark areas that we would have to really turn the gain or key light up to reach those areas to remove those areas but when we inverted it we made every pixel the same amount of brightness so it's going to be easier to key this out and if the effect is too extreme you can turn this down to maybe 75 so it blends with the original a little bit more but you know the point of this is we can make this as dramatic as we want because we have the original to go to make every single pixel of same amount of brightness or even go to the opposite so we have whatever range we want to go to and for this example I'll probably do something like 75 75 is a nice blend value so it's going to be easier for us to key that out and we definitely do have some problems with you know our footage is now messed up it's not the right brightness and everything because we know we did this invert effect and even the shadow and highlight may have messed it up but but the point is to get a good key first if you get a good key don't worry about the footage we just want a good key then we'll work with the footage and that's actually very easy to fix once we have the right key so that's our main goal right now just do whatever it takes to get a good alpha mat get a good key now yeah sometimes you have these like dark shadows and stuff like that in your screen and like I said techniques like these the shadow and highlight and the invert really helped out but sometimes you might just want to brighten this area so what you can do is create an adjustment layer you can do control alternate why that's a good shortcut and basically just click on this adjustment layer click on the pen tool and mask around that dark area it's good to just to brighten it now a lot of times like I said the shadow and highlight works really good but also a lot of times just making a mask and brightening it up is better so we'll add a brightness and contrast effect to this adjustment layer apply it to the adjustment layer and we'll just brighten it up and then we'll just add some feather click F add some feather to that mask there we go that really helps that sometimes when you just brighten up a certain area it really helps out our key brighten up our Chianina also said the shadow and highlight invert really helped too but what happens is sometimes we need to brighten it it might lose saturation so what we can do is add a vibrance effect to that brightening adjustment layer and just turn the saturation or vibrance up to better match the brighter colors now that being said that some difficulties because now we had an adjustment layer and now if we just add the key light effect to this layer that it's not going to see that adjustment because the adjustment is made on a different layer after the footage so what we can do is actually create another adjustment layer above that one and we can add the key light to that adjustment layer because it doesn't that says that you can't add key light to adjustment layers all right so I key light to that top adjustment layer so I hope you see the reason why we added this key light to adjustment layer above the brightening area because if we add it to the footage the key light wouldn't see that brighten adjustment we did there and both we added adjustment layer above the brighten area then the key light can notice that adjustment we didn't utilize those advantages because you know adjustment layers work with any effect exam that says that we can't use key light with an adjustment layer so that being said basically what I'm going to do is copy all these effects right here grab a ball hit ctrl C and go to the key light adjustment layer delete this and hit ctrl V so now the effects will be applied after that brightening adjustment to help out now what we can do is add another key light effect so add another adjustment layer and that will add another key light to that adjustment layer so I'll grab the eyedropper tool and just a select this color so hope you see the idea of you know of limiting these colors because the more colors we limit the less colors that we'll have to remove and we do that in hopes to preserve the for gram because we don't want to remove you know colors from the subject so that it will be transparent so the less about a colors that we have to remove the better because that I'll preserve our subject and make it a better key so let's go ahead and turn inside and make this a good key like I said we probably need to select the least saturated areas so we'll go ahead and uncheck this effects button right here and then we'll select the more desaturated colors so that I'll help out a little bit like I said never turn it the final result always do intermediate result we're just going to refine this may look good use those techniques we used before to make this look good [Music] all right so I've made all the adjustments I want I added all those adjustments to the key light right here and then I had a key cleaner effect so I got the key just about how I want it so it looks good but now remember that those colors are messed up because we added that brightening area then we messed with the you know the shadow and highlights I'm going to invert all kind just mess up the colors a lot so here's what we're going to do to fix that grab all your adjustment layers all your footage and everything or grab all those layers and hit pre-compose move all attributes into new composition so basically this will now be our footage and so now it's one layer basically what we can do is go in here copy our original footage and ctrl C go up here go back to the main composition hit ctrl V so we'll rename this hit enter rename this original footage then what we're going to do is we're going to rename this to keyed footage so we have the original footage right here and then we have the key footage right here so we're going to drag the original footage down to the bottom then hit toggle switches modes until we see track matte feature right here then we'll go to this drop down menu right here and then click alpha matte so basically what this did is it robbed the Alpha matte from this key footage but use the colors or pixels of the original footage so we intelligently put the key footage above the original footage so that when we hit track matte it would steal that matte so now we have we have the advantages of both we have the original colors of the original footage but then we have the matte of the keyed footage so now this works out perfectly so one thing it's very important that you understand order okay so you have to make those adjustments before you make the actual key because you can make adjustments after you make the key it's not going to affect your alpha Matt's not going to affect anything so make sure you make the adjustments before you make the key and a lot of beginners don't understand that you have to make the adjustments make all the things you want to do before you do the key then you can get out so the key can like I said utilize those advantages now let's let's suppose you have a lot of bad green spills it's fake added some you know some green spill but sometimes it really hurts your key because when you do the key keys out you know the foreground that's really bad so I'm gonna show you a way you can actually fix this and it's actually a pretty barbaric caveman's straight forward way of doing this but basically what we're going to do is copy the key light adjustment layer so hit ctrl X it's going to cut it we're at an adjustment layer hold ctrl alt on Y and hit control V to paste the key light effect and basically what you can do is go to this adjustment layer and this mask out key light from that area so just mask out this area and then hit em and then we're going to turn this mask to subtract so basically it's subtracting key light from that area so key light the key light effect is not applying to this area because we hit subtract and basically we mask out the suggestion layer from this place you can kind of visualize it so I want the key light is only applying to this place right here so when we apply it boom it doesn't effect this place right here so that's the advantage now we probably do have to add keyframe for this because you're going to move around a little bit so just hit em like that and then just click the stopwatch right here at a keyframe go forward in your you know go forward in time and just move it around to make sure that you know it doesn't go out of place maybe add a little feather so hit F add a little bit of feather and just you know keyframe that around to make sure that it doesn't go off the subject like this and also you don't want it to do that so make sure it stays on your subjects you just add some keyframes move it around you know do what it takes so that key for the key light doesn't apply to that certain place of your footage so that's a very straightforward barbaric way of accomplishing that effect now also if you use key light as an adjustment layer and not directly applying it to the footage if you use as an adjustment layer make sure and grab the adjustment layer in the footage and everything and pre-compose it so it won't affect other objects other background objects in your scene so pre-compose it make sure remove all attributes in a new composition there we go so there's he's composite into our you know scene so basically in this example are some spill so you wouldn't you would want to add an Advent spill suppressor and there we go just apply it to our footage and gets rid of all that green like I said you can turn this to ultra if you don't like how it darkens those greens like that so you know I get several backgrounds here just to test it out you know suppose I like this one okay so we're going to use this one let me just flip it around so sometimes like I said you can have these harsh edges like that you see that edge right there and basically I'm going to show you another way to fix that even though the refine hard matte did work very nicely and then we're dominate edge colors worked really nicely because it gets rid of the harsh edge but I'm going to show you another way we can actually do this so what we can do is actually add another key light adjustment to our footage now what this is it we're not going to change the opacity or transparency key out anything with this basically we're going to use one of the cool properties down here is you can actually change the edge brightness or color correction go down here to this tab check enable edge color correction so basically what we're allowed to do is just turn up the brightness and everything of the edges and you can turn up the edge softness to extend it out to you know further into the footage basically we can just turn up the brightness of the footage and we can just adjust this however one we can also go down here to color balancing we can just cut tint it to a certain color open up the wheel here pay attention to our tenant towards pink or something you know so basically this is cool because sometimes that we really need that to blend into our footage if the edge is too dark or too light we can just really have a lot control here to change brightness and everything of our actor around the edge to make it blend in with the environment better so before after so that really does help because we tend to that cat pink color and we brighten it up a little bit so it really helps just blend it into the environment so be aware of that feature the edge color correction that's the easiest way to do it on After Effects pretty sweet and when we do this edge color correction we want to make sure that the key light View is on final result and that's very important because you remember what I said intermediate result only affects the opacity of pixels and final result is what changes the colors and everything so when we do the key we do want to be on intermediate results we're only affect the opacity and not ruin the color and everything but for effects like these where we're changing the color of the edge and everything we won't change this to final result because final result is what changes colors an edge edge color correction is actually changing the colors of our edges and everything but it's very important that you have two effects one key light effect is for keying out you know the green screen and everything and the second key light effect is for this edge color correction so make sure there's 2 separate effects there we go before after before after wonderful wonderful so it's really hard to remember all of my technique I'm trying to remember them all input all of my key techniques into this video but I want to show you one last alternative to key cleaner so let's go ahead and remove key cleaner so we just have the key light effect and this effect is called refined soft matte this effect can be really good it and really bad at the same time the first time I said things that are really really good about it let's go ahead and put it in at least half resolution so we can see what's going on here firstly the good things about it is it really finds those edges feel it before and peel it after look at that detail it adds so wonderful that looks really good adds so much detail finds all those edges you can actually see the region that it's searching those edges it is a lot better than key cleaner as far as finding those edges so that worked really nice about it also another thing did about it that it has the dominate edge color feature so like we said down here with a harsh edge well as before well it fixes things like that so all together this refined soft matte does have a lot of advantages when you add it to our key footage because it finds those edges it fix a lot of problems and let me go in to feel our good things about it let me show you something let me go ahead and mask little hole here like suppose there's a little hole on footage so let me go ahead and turn this to subtract there's a little hole our footage guess what happens when we turn refine soft matte on boom that hole disappears and it knows that hope that holds not supposed to be there because when it's these little small holes like that it gets rid of them no it gets rid of them because when you check view edge region is that yellow completely covers the hole and it's going to get rid of the hole so that's how it works so we've make this hole too big and the yellow doesn't cover the hole like that so it's not going to get rid of the hole now see it doesn't get rid of the hole it tries to find a bit edge but it doesn't get rid of the hole because the yellow the edge region does not cover the entire thing like that but we make it smaller that's kind of fill in the hole because the edge region covers the entire hole that's the way that works now even though that seems like an advantage there are disadvantages to that let me try to show you an example take a look at something like this right here let's go ahead and add refine soft matte this footage and see what happens although it does do a nice job finding those edges it fills in holes like this and sometimes those holes do not need to be filled in I haven't slot around the elbow like if we go forward it's probably going to be a hole right here that's going to fill in a lot of times it just doesn't it doesn't look nice because it fills in those holes that sometimes we really want to be there also as another advantage and disadvantage at the same time depending on your footage it gets rid of little spot if you have a little spot on your green screen that you don't want to be there if the view edge region covers the entire spot like this right here it covered the entire spot it's going to get rid of that spot which is nice sometimes but sometimes we have spots of Waunakee so there's a lot of good good advantages and bad advantages to this refined soft matte effect so I've had like a lot of experience with refined soft matte I used to use a lot I found all the advantages and disadvantages and another disadvantage it actually has is the causes of like chat or you may also tell them out before about the googling Keys like shaking around the keys where the edge is kind of Google around well refine soft map tends to cause that sometimes because it really deep by detail searchers for those ages and but every frame it doesn't search the same exact way so it adds a little bit of Google sometimes but that can be fixed when you turn this shadow reduction on to like smoother slower something like that it reduce that chatter but then it takes a long time for it to render so if you turn that off and get rid of chatter there are a lot of nice things about refined soft matte for example this clip where there's no holes and it works just fine we can use soft matte in this case but you know other cases like this one where there's going to be holes like action scenes and stuff like that we can't use refined soft matte because it's gonna fill in those holes that we actually want to be there also another good feature just like refine hard matte refined soft matte also has motion blur alright so we can add motion blur things like that and it also has these other features like feather contrast smooth you can play with those but they're not really necessary because we can we can make all those adjustments inside the key light effect itself anyway we're fine soft matte can be really good or really bad depending on your scene but I want to throw that there in case you guys find it helpful so we can kind of do a little experiment here here is the key cleaner and here with refine soft matte so you can see the refined soft matte does get more of those details helps it look a little bit better sometimes also you consider the fact that key cleaner renders much much faster all right so here's refined soft matte and here's key cleaner so let's refine soft matte key cleaner it finds off matte key cleaner your find soft matte key cleaner so there's advantages to both of them the don't confuse the two there's refine hard matte which just has the domination dominate edge colors there's refined soft matte which calculates edge details stuff like that so don't confuse those refined hardbat and refine soft matte but you can see that both refine hard matte and refine soft matte have this dominate edge color here and here both of them have it and one thing I want to warn you is that you can't use key cleaner after you use that damaged edge killer because it actually restructures the pixels on the scene see if we try to add key cleaner after that guess what happens it just messes up because the paces are already restructure it when key cleaner tries to find edge it just messes up so we can't use like a key cleaner after we use this dominate edge colors either on refine hard matte or fine soft matte both of them have done edge colors we can't use key cleaner after we do that I mean when you Dookie in for so long you always key techniques I'm trying to fit them all in one video is turn this videos I could turn out really long soft work I'm really sorry about that but I'm trying to fit in and compact all the information so it will help you guys out I think this is probably the longest tutorial I've ever done the history of V universe I just know there's something out there that I miss but hey comment your questions about anything you know anything I missed because I can't really do everything in the video when we have community discussions everyone learns so much and you know it's one of the best ways of spreading intelligent information you know you know by discussions so go ahead and comment something and it's likely I'll reply and hey if you enjoyed you know gain the knowledge that I presented in this video leave a like it took a lot of time to put this episode together you know likes are so helpful and be sure be sure to subscribe blast that red subscribe button I try to provide you know techniques and knowledge to you and my other viewers that maybe isn't covered in other places but anyway it's time this long episode has come to an end I hope you've learned something it's been so fun I'm excited to catch you in the next video a visionary universe

Channel: Visionary Fire

Views: 333,222

Rating: 4.9449778 out of 5

Keywords: after, effects, tutorial, visual, visionary, universe, lendon, bracewell, design, green, screen, blue, background, key, keying, keylight, primatte, keyer, chroma, remove, transparent, composite, overlay, ultimate, advanced, techniques, 27, best, light, bad edges, color correction, spill suppress, green reflection, how to, backdrop, fix, refine, foreground, cleaner, hard, soft, matte, alpha, transparency, channel, detail, Ultimate Green Screen Tutorial | Crazy Advanced Keying Techniques

Id: b6aXY27fSSA

Length: 40min 12sec (2412 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 18 2016