5 Green Screen Mistakes Beginners Make

in case anybody's been wondering why I haven't been uploading quite as much lately because I've been on an adventure a crazy adventure to this cold and dark place that all right honestly I just have been busy lately but speaking of green screens they're not only a great way to put you into a different place they're an awesome way to do a number of effects and I use them all the time but when I first got my green screen kit there was a number of mistakes that I would often make that would cause me to have to reshoot my footage so I wanted to make this video to go over those common mistakes that happen when you first start using a green screen the five green screen mistakes that beginners make the most the first is uneven lighting and the majority of the problems you're gonna have are gonna come from three main sources one is wrinkles and the first thing you want to do is make sure that you are stretching your green screen out as much as possible my green screen kit came with these little clamps that have these hooks that you can tie twine to I definitely recommend using them because most green screens for some reason don't actually stretch out the full length of the green screen stand next make sure you either iron it or steam it I bought a steamer from a thrift store for about $5 check out your local thrift store I'm sure you'll be able to find one too and next is just making sure you get the lighting correct most of us are setting up these kind of kits in our home so make sure you're blocking out most of the outside lighting that's going to be an issue and make sure when you set up your lights that you're just getting an even distribution it's not about setting up really strong lights it's about setting up even lighting one way you can check to see if you have even lighting is to darken the exposure on your camera this will kind of highlight any areas that might be of concern and lastly for uneven lighting is shadows you can actually see right here when we key this out you can kind of see the shadowy area and then when we put a background you can actually see that shadow which makes it look pretty unrealistic so make sure when you're setting up your lighting for the subject it's not casting a shadow and make sure there's a little bit of distance between the subject and the green-screen which leads me to the mistake number two which is light fall-off and light fall-off is the reflection of the green color onto your subject now first you see green around the edges of my hair this isn't reflection so much as it is just the green screen showing through some of those lighter parts of the edge of my hair what I'm referring to is some of the green reflection that you can actually see right here on my shoulder I can be a real issue depending on how reflective and how bad it actually is now if your green screen is lit too heavily sometimes the reflection can actually come right off the green screen and sometimes the reflection can come right off your walls too if you're shooting in a small space this is the case just hang up a black sheet that will absorb the light on the outside edges of where you set up your green screen and if you can put a little space between the subject and the green screen this will definitely help in eliminating those reflections just be careful because the further away you get from the green screen the smaller will look by perspective and you might start running out of room now a mistake number three is shutter speed now shutter speed controls the motion blur that you're gonna see in your shot a 180 degree shutter angle most closely mimics real-life motion blur so this is often what you're going to set your camera to for instance if you're shooting at 24 frames per second you'd be shooting at roughly a 50 shutter speed and if you're shooting at 60 frames per second you'd be shooting at roughly a 120 shutter speed if you were to shoot a lower shutter speed you'd be seeing more motion blur in a higher shutter speed you'd be see less motion blur now when you're shooting on a green screen that motion blur can become a problem now when we key these both out you're gonna see the one with less motion blur is a lot cleaner and you're dealing with a lot less green in the motion blur and don't worry there are easy ways to add in that motion blur back into the shot afterwards and post so my recommendation what shooting on a green screen is to up your shutter speed to get rid of most of that motion blur now the fourth mistake is wearing green clothes or having green tattoos now this might seem obvious but when you have all these other things to consider sometimes you just forget about what your subject is wearing whether it be green clothes or green tattoos my buddy hunter here has green in his tattoos and I can't tell you how many times we have forgotten about that only after shooting everything and starting to edit do we realize oh man your tattoo is showing and now you've got a hole in your arm so try to be mindful of that before you start shooting now the fifth mistake is probably the one that I am most guilty of most of the time and that is matching the lighting from the subject to the background now you can do a lot of this in post just by trying to match the color correction but if your background ends up having a bright Sun in it and you don't have that bright kind of lighting in your shot it's just not gonna look realistic when I did this effect here I knew I wanted this background so what I did is I shot that background and then I brought out my green screen I used just that natural lighting so that the lighting I knew would match from my background to whatever I shot in front of it now let's take a look at that shot from the beginning and how to kind of match that up because you wouldn't want the color correction from this shot to be the one that you see here with a much brighter background you're gonna want to up that background quite a bit there's a couple things we can do to really kind of help this particular shot one we can brighten up the subject in the front here so that it looks like it matches a little bit better to the background but if you really want to add that realism to it and have that look of snow actually falling in front of the subject and you're gonna want to add an extra layer of snow so what I did is actually just looked up snow footage and I found this snow footage against a black background that's perfect because what we can do here is put this right over our other layer go to our blend modes and go to screen and it's going to take out the black in the image and it's going to make it transparent so now it looks like there is actually snow falling in front of me this is a little trick you can do to really add some realism to your green screen shot in addition to obviously the fan that I had by the green-screen kind of add that extra element everyone I hope you liked the video if you did like it and you're not already please subscribe to my channel for more content to come I'm gonna be trying to do more videos that aren't just tutorials but also kind of fun skits that work in some of the effects that I'm working on and learning so should be a fun time as always I'll see you in the next video at peace

Channel: Skyler Thomas

Views: 1,699,649

Rating: 4.9486237 out of 5

Keywords: green screen, green screen tutorials, green screen mistakes, green screen tricks, green screen techniques, green screen after effects, green screens, creative green screen techniques, common green screen mistakes, 5 green screen mistakes, skyler thomas, skyler, green screen premiere pro, premiere pro, after effects

Id: QTFT-H3D_H0

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 04 2018