Advanced green screen keying tutorial

[Music] oh hello and welcome to this really fun tutorial by promotion because today i'm going to show you how you can be [Music] the tiger king just follow me into after effects so but before we start if you have any questions concerning after effects visual effects tigers motion graphics equipment software and so on just leave me a comment down below and i promise i will answer all of your comments but now let's jump into the tutorial what is it that we are going to create today so first of all you will learn a professional workflow from beginning to end on how to deal with green screen footage some tips and tricks for being on set no matter if it's a large scale green screen or cheap backdrop i'm going to show you how you can master both and next we are going to take a look on how to shoot foreground and background so that they match perfectly and i'm also going to show you what to do if you can't shoot the foreground yourself because maybe it is tiger that you want to shoot hey and this is something super special just for you because i saw you got pretty excited as you saw my teaser for this tutorial and some of you already commented that this is simply too expensive so i'm giving you the clip i used for free and it's actually from a company called green screen animals and once i reached out to them they were the nicest as well as most professional people ever really and they were so nice to provide me with the one clip that i also used so you can follow along and create your own cool shot so the only restriction is that you cannot use it for feature films broadcast or advertising but hey feel free to use it in your personal work or maybe even in your reel so you can find the download link in the description below and now that we have the footage i'm going to show you how to prepare it and you will learn some detailed noise reduction workflows and after that i'm going to show you how to set up a key that has a solid base as well as super fine detail for hair fur or even shadows and if you stick with me a bit longer you will also learn how to create an interactive light wrap from scratch as well as how to create a real lighting for your scene and hey there will also be hundreds of handy tips and tricks along the way so let's bring out the tiger footage and get this thing going so we just drag and drop it onto this new composition icon in that way it will create a new composition for us with the same settings like our tiger footage and as a first step it always makes sense to look for the noise and grain in your footage and this is because of two reasons at first you want to have a pretty clean green screen footage for your key to work best and another reason why i do this at first is because i denoise it and render out that version so that i can work with a rendered version and as denoiser takes a lot of time to render i start with that and while it is rendering i can do all the other stuff so let's have a look at this so basically the higher your iso settings on your camera are or your aza settings so that's basically the same the one is the international standard and the other one is the american standard but they are both basically the same so that means the higher your value the more noise you have in your image and you want to have it as low as possible because of course you don't want to key out grain and noise so let's take a look over here because that footage already looks pretty clean but let's really zoom in into that footage as close as we can and now i'm also going down here and just take a look at the green channel and you can see we have a lot of noise or a bit of noise in our green channel so let's denoise the footage and render it out so we can work with that and of course we simply go to the effects and presets and search for the remove grain effect and drag it onto our footage and we go to the rgb again so maybe you have used that before you have a preview viewing window and you already see what the effect is doing here when i turn this on and off you can see that we have more grain and less grain but now let's use this in a more professional way because at the moment we only see it in that square and this is also where it samples the noise but it would make more sense for us to tell the effect where it actually should look for the noise because later on i want to have less noise on the box where the tiger is later on and also on the wall because he's actually crossing the wall and we can do that with the remove grain effect if we don't use the standard settings so for the sampling which is the part where it searches for the grain we don't want to do that automatic but manual and now when we zoom in you see we have a small grid here so we can make that a bit bigger again this is the area where it looks for grain and we have eight of those boxes and at the moment they're all sitting on top of each other so it looks like there's only one and we don't need that much maybe just four and now we can go to the sample points and i want to sample that and the second one yeah could be like somewhere on the floor here i want a sample point on the box and maybe one last point that green more close to the tiger now let's look at the final output and as i told you this takes a bit of time to calculate and another thing to keep in mind at the moment i'm at the first frame so frame zero we can quickly also change that in the composition going into the composition settings and set the start frame to zero so this all makes a little bit more sense now we're on frame zero and we also sample from frame zero but for example you could also go further in time where this person has already left the image and then we could set an other point in here and simply take that frame as our source frame okay now let's take a look at the green over here and turn it on and off and let's have a look at the green channel and by the way you can access all the channels by hitting down alt plus one for red two for green three for blue and four for the alpha channel when i turn this on and off you hopefully see that we have way more grain when the effect isn't enabled perfect so let's quickly render this out and therefore we use the adobe media encoder because in that way it can render in the background and we can keep on working so we simply go to composition add to adobe media encoder and this will automatically open up the media encoder for us and already place the composition in there there we have it and let's click on our preset because at the moment by default it's an h.264 codec so when we click on that we have more options and for the format i want to have a quick time and i want to have a prores 444 which has the most information with the best file size so for the output i just call this tiger denoise save hit okay and don't forget to hit that play button now it starts rendering in the background and we can go on working here and i have already done that here in my extra folder there's the denoised footage and you see when i turn the footage on and off that all the noise is gone perfect okay so now we have a clean footage to work with and maybe this is the right point in time to tell you that actually we're not going to create a really cool key out of this denoise footage but we're going to key it so that we have a pretty nice stencil to key out the original footage that means we don't have to take care of green spill or if we have to go into any extreme settings so we could basically even tint the whole tiger red if that makes any sense for the keying process because later on we will only use that as a stencil for the original footage now let's bring out the footage that i have shot and let's watch out where i'm reacting and this is some what over here so this should be fine when i bring the denoised tiger above this go down with the transparency so that i can see both you see what i have done i simply flipped the clip and then aligned it so it matches the table and i have also scaled this up great but how have i actually filmed that because this is the trickiest part so here's a really cool pro tip when you are on set there are actually three things you have to be super aware of when doing stuff like that you need to have three settings at first you need to know which lens you're filming with because later on you can then try to get as close as possible to that focal length which is what i did here and then you need to know the camera height as well as the tilt this is super important because this is the only thing that influences your horizon line because there's one common mistake that nearly everyone does so i ask you a simple question and let's see if you do the same mistake let's say my horizon is in the middle so what happens if i move the camera up or down and yeah most of the people would say when i bring the camera up the horizon goes down and when i bring the camera down the horizon goes up so normally what they do is when they see that the horizon doesn't align and it is too low they simply push up the camera a little bit more but that is wrong you don't believe me so here's a short proof of concept that a really good friend of mine shot with his drone over the last days you can see the horizon stays perfectly in the middle and the drone flies up to 100 meters and also pretty quick did this shot in google earth studio just to show you that even if you go up to 10 000 meters the horizon will stay in the middle but what does that actually mean so we see that the horizon in our tiger footage is above the middle so basically that means that the camera was tilted down so when i shot my footage i had to also tilt it down to make that shot look realistic or to make both shots match and this is super important because now let's take a look on how we can find the horizon here and this is super easy because to make a shot or a composition look realistic they both need to be on the same horizon in other words they need to have the same vanishing point so how do we find a vanishing point that's pretty easy let's create a new composition i make it red for now and click on the pen tool hide it now i'm just creating one stroke along that line here click away and now i can create another one over here and okay so now let's hit ctrl r so we get this guides here and i'm simply dragging that to that position and it looks like our horizon is up here so that means that our camera was tilted down because remember if it would be completely straight the horizon line would be around here and what we can directly do is click on the tiger hit y to get the pen behind tool and now we bring that onto the horizon so now let's bring down the transparency of our tiger again so why am i doing that with the vanishing points so here's a quick example here's a shot of a background and here's the vanishing point and here's a shot of me walking and my anchor point is set to my feet and not to the vanishing point so now when i scale this up and down you see i get really really big or really really tiny but obviously that's not correct and not what we want so when i bring the anchor point to the vanishing point so onto the horizon line and i scale myself up and down you see now it just looks like i'm getting further away or closer to the camera because now it's physically and optically correct so now that we have set this up let's start with our keying process and actually let's just maybe start here hit b for begin and simply go forward maybe just like so and i'm simply trimming the comp to the work area because this will simply make it easier for the tutorial when i don't have to do roto and all that stuff for like 300 frames but only 25 frames so now next thing that we want to do is create a garbage mat for our tiger and a garbage mat is simply a mat that really roughly rotos out or gets rid of everything that's not necessary for the shot so for example that in the back the front of the box this guy here and we can do that with something pretty easy just bring out the key light effect which we will later use for the keying and i'm simply going to take a green color close to the tiger maybe i'm soloing this and now i'm simply going to the extreme here and remember you can hit alt plus 4 to see the alpha matte and basically what i want to create here is a really really hard matte only around our tiger and after that i'm using a simple choker and simply go down maybe until -100 and at the moment it has a black outline but we want to have it green again because later on we only want to key out the parts that are really close to the tiger and this is what we are going to create here so i'm not going for a final result but for an intermediate result and that's pretty good so now let's just quickly create a mask maybe around here and we have created a pretty easy garbage mat and now we only have to deal with that part of the clip so now i'm simply pre-composing this and call this our matte because remember we only want to create a stencil matte for all of this and i want to move all the attributes in the new composition and hit ok i just saw that we are also cutting out lots of the fine details here like the shadows to get that back in we simply have to extend the matte and therefore we can use another simple choke by simply duplicating it by hitting ctrl d maybe once again yeah because this is our shadow part here back in our tiger comp let's duplicate this matte two times because i want to create a really hard key so for the core of all of this with just black and white information and that just makes more sense in in a minute and then i'm also going to create a soft key for the fur the hair and all the shadow details so why are we doing this let me show you that because i can show you the final comp already with the help of post production and now i'm going into the mat and we have the soft key and you see when i'm just soloing the soft key that key simply doesn't work and you can tweak that key as long as you want you simply don't get a good result so now let's do the same with just the core you see that this even looks way way more messed up so this is something that only works in combination [Music] so now let's concentrate on the core and for this we once again take the key light effect you're right there's no professional extra super keying plugin we do all of that with key light we simply sample a green color that is close to the tiger and what you can do now is to click on the green color and find tweak it until you get a result that you are happy with so simply play with this and the more often you do so the better you will nail the green tone so hit ok and now we are simply going to find tweak this a little bit but only with the clip black and clip white and i know there are more settings for example you could shrink your matte if you don't get the outline right or even soften it but believe me you only need the clip black and lip white the other sliders are only there to cheat you only want to remove the green screen and nothing else we can also go to the intermediate result again because in this way we get green tones again and simply duplicate the key light effect and key out that fine green here again okay this really looks ugly but stick with me because i told you the matte doesn't have to look good the final result has to look good so let's bring out another choker and i'm just choking this into the negative direction until we fill all the holes so if we look on this the holes are black and the more we go down here the more we fill them up okay and now we get a strange outline but again let's duplicate the joker and go into the other direction and now we can choke this in maybe like so and remember this is just the core of our key later on so this is now all the parts that really need to be opaque or completely visible now let's solo the soft key and here we try to create a really really soft result with the key light effect so again you see that we still have all the detail in the shadow over here okay now this is our mat so far so at the moment we have a hard transition from our core to our soft so we can simply blur our core a little bit with a gaussian blur you see so okay we are starting to get somewhere but now we see the border where our garbage mat has been so we want to feather our garbage mat a little bit and we can do that by going into the matte and simply bring out a channel blur bring it onto the denoised footage and just bring out the alpha blurriness you see it's only blurring the alpha channel not the image itself so back in our tiger composition we now have this soft part here we now have our tiger which still looks a bit strange and then we have the soft part on top which takes care of all the fine details but at the moment yes i feel you it still looks a bit strange this is mainly because we have blurred our core so if we already bring this beneath the soft layer this already looks way better so now let's quickly start working on the colors therefore i'm at first bringing out the levels effect to the footage itself because this looks a bit flat and when you take a look at the levels effect you see that we don't have black values and we don't have real white values so i simply slide that white over until we start to see something and the black also now we are talking okay it looks way better now let's simply pre-compose the soft and the core and call this our mat because as i told you we can now bring out the tiger now and the matte on top and now i'm using the matte as an alpha matte and if you don't have the matte options here just click on that toggle switches mode button now you have a track matte and for the tiger for the alpha i want to use the matte layer so i'm choosing the alpha matte should be the matte layer there we have it okay now we see the original footage and now we can start play with this if we want to find tweak the key we can always go into the matte and simply work on it so for example in the beginning we can simply create a white layer actually the color doesn't really matter and paint back in that part with a mask bring out the mask properties and set a keyframe for mask path now you see that i have simply plugged the holes that i could maybe also have done within the key itself but hey this is a really handy way to not mess up the key when you already have a really fine detailed key now that we have done this and you see for example the hair when i go to full resolution and i'm also zoomed in here you can see that i have all the hair with a little bit of shadow beneath it so i don't think that you can get more detail out of this but obviously it's still green so going to the tiger and add a hue and saturation effect to it now i'm going into the green and here i can define the green tone and here's a cool trick if you're not sure if you have selected the perfect green tone simply don't desaturate it but saturate it so when you go to 100 percent here you see exactly which green tones are affected and with that second slider you can soften this so now it goes from this green tone to this green tone and fades out into a little bit of orange obviously we want to go into the other direction and what you can also do play with the lightness of this because maybe you lose some detail now so just simply make this a little bit brighter and let's have a look at this so now that we have a great base for this here's another cool thing because i still don't quite like the shadow it's still a little bit too hard for me and we can go into the key but hey let's create a separate shadow layer with our denoised footage so i'm bringing the denoised tiger once again behind it and call this our shadow and for that specific clip i know the shadow shall only be that part here so i'm actually masking out all that tricky stuff and now i can key only the shadow so i'm bringing out an extract to the shadow and you see we don't have really black parts and not really white parts but we have a lot of those mid tones and i want to get rid of that so i'm bringing up the slider and you see now that part starts to disappear and i can feather this with that slider here so let's just make this as soft as we want to have it and i can also feather the mask maybe bring this in a little bit what i have now is a separate shadow of course at the moment it's green but i can simply copy the hue and saturation effect and bring it onto that shadow layer and maybe change its blending mode to something like darken now we have created a shadow from the original source without even keying perfect now it's time to go into the tricky part and therefore let's once again pre-compose our matte and the tiger and call it our key now we have a key and a shadow because now i want to integrate all of this a little bit more therefore let's create an adjustment layer and call this set duration and this is just so we can see it better because i'm bringing out the saturation effect and really bring this up very high so now we can see our colors a bit better now let's bring out a levels effect bring it onto our key and what i do now i simply go through the different tones red green and blue and simply try to make this look more integrated also i'm going into the rgb therefore i can bring up the exposure with that exposure slider and now you see i bring it up until i only have the darkest parts of the image you see i still have dark parts in my shirt but the tiger doesn't but it should have the same darkest parts so we can go into the levels again and simply drag the black slider over until the darkest parts of our tiger start to come back in again perfect now let's reset this and get rid of the saturation and let's have a look at our levels effect this was before and this is after so this is really looking cool maybe still a little bit too saturated overall so i'm bringing that down just a little bit and actually we are really starting to get somewhere so i wanted to show you two more really cool tricks the first thing is that you may have noticed that our tiger is lit from that side but in my living room the sunlight comes in from that direction so i want to change that so therefore i'm going to create a really cool trick and i'm doing that on the key itself i'm bringing out another levels effect and i call this light change because now i want to create a highlight and therefore i'm just bringing in the bright part now it's brighter and i'm going to the first frame i'm simply going to mask this because it should hit our tiger somewhere around here strange because now i have cut it out the tiger and this is absolutely not what i want i want the light change only to happen on that part and we can do that because once we have created a mask i can twirl down the key go to the effect and this works for all layers where you have an effect as well as a mask so we go to the effect the light change and when i go down here i have now compositing options and i hit plus and this will use the first mask that we have created to mask out the effect so i could get rid of this by hiding minus or i could add a second mask for another effect or for this effect okay and now this allows us to go into our mask and you can also see that it's an effect mask now and i can set a keyframe go forward a few frames and simply adjust the mask so that only one side of our tiger gets brighter and this is really cool now because now we are working on the key but as we have the shadows separately the shadow is not affected by the light you see only the tiger which is just perfect and of course we want to feather the mask and let's go on to the end and maybe something like this should be the brightest part and obviously you could take more time for doing that now i'm going to duplicate that light change create a second mask and this goes on to somehow the other part of the image and i'm not using the same mask and subtract it because it's not always the exact opposite once again i go down to the effect for the light change 2 i want to have mask 2 so i can simply go to the minus while i have mask 1 selected but for the light change 2 we don't want to have it brighter but darker so we bring in the black or even better take out some white that way it gets darker and also feather that mask a lot set another keyframe and we do the exact same thing here i'm looking for parts where the light would not hit okay let's feather both of the masks even more and maybe you don't really see it but if you take a look at the before and after this makes a huge difference so i'm selecting both of the effects that just makes such a difference so i'm actually still fascinated by the hair detail that we get out of here and again this is half resolution this is the hair detail we can get out of this and take a look at this fur that's just amazing and again i'm really rushing through this if you take your time for that i promise it will look even more amazing so last but not least i told you that we are going to create a light wrap so what is a light wrap as the name already says it is light that is wrapping around in this case around our tiger so let's at first define the light or the color of the light so the whole atmosphere therefore that's pretty easy let's duplicate our footage call this our source for the light wrap and now simply bring out a gaussian blur because i want to not have all the details in here but i simply want to have it brighter on that side darker on that side a little bit of those colors over here a little bit of those colors over here like it would be in a real scenario when the tiger would really be in there that would be the light bouncing around and let's say if i would have painted my walls red the tiger would also be tinted a little bit red from that side and we want to try to mimic that so for our source of the light wrap we simply bring up the gaussian blur like a lot and we want to repeat the edge pixels so that we don't get those alpha channel over here okay and now let's bring this really up because now what you see we have darker parts here in the back brighter here on the side and more gray and a little bit of brown on that side perfect let's just pre-compose this and call it actually leave the name source for light wrap comp hit okay now i'm going to duplicate the key bring it above our light wrap and let's quickly just solo what we have here because now it's going to be a little bit tricky but stick with me and you will see what we are doing i'm using the key as an alpha matte okay basically we could bring this on top of everything now you can see that the tiger somehow gets tinted in the color of our background so when i turn this on and off it somehow adopts the colors which makes him look like he's in that atmosphere but as i told you i don't want that for the whole tiger but actually only that it's wrapping around the edges of the tiger so again let's pre-compose this this is our tiger color and again we duplicate the key and use this this time as an alpha inverted mat so now it's cutting off itself basically but we want to have a little bit of this border so now once again we use a choker effect for that because you see now we can make the stencil that cuts out the tiger color bigger or smaller you see and i'm also bringing out a gaussian blur once again to feather this okay now i can unsolo this you see with and without and this looks really strange at the moment but when we play with the opacity here this will all make more sense i just want this maybe just like so and maybe that's even too much and again you could also roto out like parts of the feet or stuff like that if you don't want to have it everywhere but if you look at the tail of the tiger for example this just this just makes a total difference now for last final touch let's just make an overall color grade maybe with the lumetri colors give it a little bit more contrast and maybe we go down with the color temperature just a little bit maybe yeah maybe the colors but and here's a really cool last tip because when i watch this now i still think oh okay there's a little bit of a greenish yellowish tone and i would go into the u and saturation would bring it on to our tiger would maybe just play with the master you a little bit you see but the last tip that i have for you today is leave it as it is go to sleep sleep one night open it up again and i promise you will be surprised what you have done because sometimes you really look at it and think oh that was just way too saturated or the blacks are completely off but if you have worked on that shot for like we have done for over half an hour your eyes somehow adopt to that so you need to take some rest do another shot and then go back to this and find tweak it hey and this is already the end of this tutorial so i really hope that you learned something about keying green screen productions and how to set up all of this in a really cool procedural way so if you like what you see then show me your results download the clip in the description below and surprise me with something awesome and by the way if you click that nice subscribe button i can do way more of those tutorials for you and i really love doing those but for now i wish you a lot of fun with tigers in after effects [Music] [Music] you

Channel: flomotion

Views: 100,683

Rating: 4.9186754 out of 5

Keywords: aftereffects, flomotion, tutorial, motion, graphics, green screen, key, keying, greenscreenanimals, animal, animals, advanced, beginner, easy, easy to follow, tigerking, tiger king, joe exotic, donald trump, kim kardashian, free footage, downlaod, greenscreen footage, noise, grain, remove noise, remove grain, light wrap, lion, lionking, lion king, professional, lesson, free, after effects, after effects 2021, compositing, comp, katy perry, siberian, stock footage, before after, making of, chroma key

Id: LhQsZTigU_s

Length: 34min 8sec (2048 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020