Hello, everyone. Danasa with Action VFX. in this tutorial, we will be keying this
green screen shot in Adobe After Effects. If you haven't seen my previous tutorial
where I listed five chroma keying tips, feel free
to check it out on the description below. Because in this video, I'm going to apply
those tips that I mentioned to key our footage here, as well as a couple other new tips and
tricks that I will show you along the way before we start. Don't forget to click the Subscribe button
so you won't miss out on more tutorials like this one in a way
Without further ado, let's get started. OK, so here we have this plate that I got
from our friends at Red Giant and we are going to key out
the green background. And this isn't going to be a walk in the park
because as you can see, our talent here is wearing a reflective armor
that reflects the green screen . So we have to be careful to not key out
that part of the armor. Not to mention that we have heavy motion
blur on the sword and also some green screen
spilling on the boots and pants. And, of course, the hair details. All of these complication
means that we cannot just use one key light to tackle this,
so we will use multiple keying layers
and combine them into one cohesive matte. So first, let's prepare our shot. As I mentioned in the five tips video,
always denoise your shot and always do garbage mask While the shot here looks
clean enough on first glance, it's always a good habit to denoise it
before we begin keying. to denoise it
you can use effects such as remove grain. But for this,
I am using Neatvideo's reduce noise plugin and using that plugin, it's really simple
to all I have to do is to just grab an open space in the footage
and then click on build profile. And if we check here,
we can see the before and after. the difference is more evident on the Alpha channel
when you are doing your key. So after we do noise,
I want to render this out. OK, so here is the render denoise file
and replace our original plate. And then let's add some rough mask
that is following around our subject so we can just focus on
what we need to key. OK, so this is the rough mask. Now let's pre-compose this with
all attributes, and now let's start key. Let's duplicate our plate first. The bottom layer here
will serve as a reference for the original plate
that we can go back to. So let's disable it for now. And first thing you want to do is
you want to get a core key of the shot. So let's get key like
and pick a green from the background. And here we have our rough key matte. now in the view of the keylight
we want to change the final result to intermediate
because we want to see the raw results of our footage being masked by the key
math directly without this bill suppression
or other additional effects on the result. So the corekey is essentially the inside on a skeleton mat of our key. So I'm just going to play around here
with our clip black and clip white until we get a solid
overall key on our subject. OK, so this is pretty good, but unfortunately, we are still getting
some holes in the alpha here, especially around the reflective
area of the armor. So let's patch
that let's duplicate our key layer and let's soften
the key here until the hole is filled. And then let's mask around it. And then I want to do this patching
multiple times until I cover all the holes and we get a solid, opaque
key off our subject. OK, so we have a solid key. Now you notice that I didn't really do
anything with the sword. We'll deal with the key of the sword
on its own because it has so many motion blur. So we're just going to focus on our talent
here. Now, since this is supposed to be our core
key let's create an adjustment layer. And get Matt choker, and let's erode the matte edges. And let's precompose this. Next, I want to get rid of the entire
head, especially for the head of hair, because the hair has its own issue
with the details, as you can see. So I want to do a separate
core key for that. So let's create
a mask and subtract the head, and then we want to animate it
along the shot. And then since we have the shield
coming up in front of the head, let's create another mask
to bring that part of the shield back. And then I want to do some manual cleanup
by creating a mask and subtracting some parts that I wasn't able to keep. OK, so here we can see that
we have a solid core key, so now we are going to bring back
those edges that we have eroded before, so let's duplicate our reference
recap again. Put it on top and then let's add keylight
again and change it to intermediate. And just like I mentioned before, we want to build this edge key section
by section, especially here, we can see how the key is not creating
a good uniform edges across our subject. So what I want to do
first is to get a good key on the foot one leg to make sure
that we have a good key when we are keying is to always go back and forth between using the black background
and the transparency because some pixels may be more visible
on the black background, while some others just more visible
on the transparency checkerboard. And then always compare our result
with the original footage, like the reference later
that we have here. Here we can see that
even the hard edges is a bit soft. That means when making our edge key,
I have to get a little bit of that grin spill on the edges of my subject,
but not too much. OK, so here we have a really good
ask around the foot. So let's mask around that area
and then I want to do another subtraction mask here
to get rid of some of the extra stuff on the shoelace
that I wasn't able to keep up. Next, we're going to duplicate the layer
and underneath the mask. And then let's mask around the boots
and let's do another key. And this time we want to capture the edges
on the top part of the hair that got eroded
when we were keeping the foot. And then basically,
we want to keep doing this patching method until we cover
all the edges of our subject. OK, great, so here we have successfully create
multiple layers of key of just the legs. So it's all looking nice. But when we play our shot,
we can see a little bit of jagged chattering noise on our edges. So let's get rid of that. precompose our layers. then we want to add key
cleaner effects to the camp. This will smooth out our alpha map
and reduce the radius to one. Then let's check the reduced chatter
and then get the alpha contrast to something like 20% perfect. Now we can still see
some of the green edges on our key. Some are just green spill, while others are these extra edges
that we failed to key out. So let's get an adjustment
layer and add advanced spells of pressure just to push down the green a little bit
so we can see which our spill and which are this extra edge
that we need to fix. OK, so this actually looks better, but we're going to still see
some of the green edges is now great. So these are the extra edges
that we need to get rid of, but we will fix this later. I want to first finish keeping
the entire body of our talent first. So let's disable
our spill suppressor for now, and we are going to continue
to build up the edges of our talent. OK, so here I have the edge key layers for the body, torso. So let's break and both this
and then get rid of the chattering edge again
with another key cleaner. This time, I want to make sure
that the edge radius is 0.1 to get a more tighter cleaner. And then let's continue creating edge for
the arms and the shield for the shield. I made the key. There'll be a little bit softer to accommodate the blurry edge that we get
from a little bit of motion blur. OK, so here are the key layers
for the arms and the shield. And once again, I ignored the sword here
because we will deal with that later. So now let's key outthis arm and shield together and add key cleaner
And there we go. We have created the edges of our talent. Now let's deal with the sword. The sword is very problematic
because as we can see, it is going back and forth from being a solid shape
with hard edges to a blurry smear. So to reconcile with that inconsistency,
what I'm going to do is create a soft key for the sword so we can include
the motion blur in the map. And then after that, I want to create
a mask to isolate the sword fairly tightly,
and then I want to manually animate the mask
to follow the movement of the sword. Okay, great. So now we have the body and the sword key. Let's turn on the advanced
spill suppressor to see what we have. OK, so everything is looking nice,
but we still have to deal with the extra edge pixels that pop up here in there,
especially around the lake here. So let's deal with that. Let's select all the keys that we made
except for the salt, and let's decompose it and name it something like body key
and then precompose it again. And let's name it
something like body key edge fix. Then let's go inside the edge
fixed pretty. And now we're going to do
is we are going to add some heavy effects on display layer to get rid of that
extra pixels on the edge. However, as you notice
from before our body matte precomp layer here, it's getting pretty heavy
from all the keylights inside it. So we want to render this out first. So while inside this body key precomp,
let's go to the composition
menu and click Pre Render. And we're going to make sure that we are
rendering on a QuickTime format and then we are going to include the RGB
and Alpha. And here I want to have import and replace
as my post render action that way
after we finished, render the body matte precomp that we had before
will be replaced by this new render file. So now lets it render. OK, so now we have finished rendering
and if we go back to the edge fixed break up, we see that our body,
Matte preComp, has been automatically replaced
with the render that we just had. So now let's start doing some edge fixes. Let's duplicate our layer here,
and then let's add a refine hard
matte on the duplicate layer. So refine hard matte is somewhat similar
to key cleaner in that it manipulates the edges of our map. So let's go to shift edges here
and increase it to 100%. And now we see that our matt edges
is getting extended greatly, and then I want to click on extend
where smooth and this is what we have. So what's happening here
is that we are basically grabbing pixels that are close to the edge
and then smear it up. So that way we are able to cover up those extra pixels
that we had before with this meal. However, our math edge is not too thick. So let's shrink this back. Let's put this layer below. And then on the top layer
that doesn't have the refined matte, let's set the mode to stencil alpha. And there we go. Stencil alpha is basically masking
every layer below it based on the top layer alpha, so like alpha
matte mixed with an adjustment layer. So now on this one frame,
everything looks great. We get our proper matte edge back
and we have covered up those extra pixels. However, when we hit play,
we are getting this flicker or glitches on some areas of our key here,
like on the edge part of the shield here
and also on the rim of this boots. So to get rid of that,
we basically just want to patch those glitches with the original
unfixed edge that we had before. So let's bring our original split. Put it in the middle. And now we are back to where we were
before we added the refined hard matte. So now
we're going to do another patchwork. So let's create
masks around where those glitches are, OK? So these are basically the mask patches
that I did to cover up the glitches. So now if we hit play,
this is what we have perfect. All the edges look nice. So now let's go back to the main comp
and turn on our advanced spill suppressor and see what our key looks like. Next, let's finally key out the head
and the hero. So let's duplicate that on key precomp
and keep it below all the other key. So for this one, we want to create
a semi corekey for the head. So let's get the key light and let's push the key
until we lose the tiniest of details. But we still want to have the hair clumps. Also,
we want the smooth, the edge of the mask. That way, we can combine this quirky layer with the software details seamlessly. OK, great. So this is the core key of the head. Now let's duplicate the plate again, and now we are going to do the smaller
details. first, make sure that this soft
key layer is below the core key,
and then let's follow it for now. And here we see that
the hue of the green background and the blond hair is a bit different,
but not too different. While green and yellow are two different
colors. They are still quite similar,
so we need to find a way to contrast the hair and the green
background a little bit more. And to do that,
we are going to use color balance angles. So turn our hue dial here. And now we see that the color
of the background and the hair has shifted and becoming more separated. Now let's get tint,
and then let's get curve and create that even more contrast
to really separate the background and the hair details
and then get the shift channel. And then we are going to take the alpha
from the likeness. Now, after we switch our color channel
to Alpha, it looks like our opaqueness gets reduced, so feel free to go back
to the curve and tamper with it again. Now we want to mask this layer
the only around her hair because that's the only part
where we want to key. But we cannot do that
because the shift channel effects overrides
the Alpha designation from the mask. So to get around that,
we have to do the mask on another layer. So create a solid and let's pick
the color of the hair. And then we are going to put it below. And let's off on that. This solid to the hair matte key
that we just created and then mask the solid to be around the hair
and then we want to animate the mask. So it follows the hair of
details for the entire shot. And perfect. Now let's turn our offense
bill suppressor back on, and we have our key. The last thing you might want to do after we wrap up with our green screen is to do
some manual cleanup like, for example, as you probably have noticed, there's
a weird extra pixels on the carpet there. It didn't get cleared out for some reason. So let's grab a mask and subtract
that part manually. And then we go. All we have to do now is to just drag
our composition to a background plate. And that was advanced
keying tutorial in Adobe after effects. Once you have your key,
you'll probably need to add some VFX elements to your shot,
which you can get any time at ActionVFX.com. We provide high quality
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Thank you so much for watching. Let us know in the comments section below
what kind of tutorials that you'd like to see next
and see you next time. Bye bye.
