After Effects Tutorial - Advanced Keying

hi guys professor Paul here to revisit chromakeying and after-effects and last time we we worked on it we were using this image right here of mr. Brandon on green screen and we hit a couple of challenges not the least of which were these yellow tracking dots that were all over the screen they they give us a little bit of a problem especially because when we tried to remove them we also removed all the little spritzee detail fine hair detail on the top of his head which we didn't want to do so we were left with either really just crushing the detail out of his hair or going and individually painting out these dots which neither of which was acceptable to me so I want to look at some advanced techniques today and the important bit here is that we are going to treat the Alpha and the RGB as two separate and distinct entities and then we are going to combine them together alright so up until now we've only dealt with RGB and alpha living on the same layer right if you look at the top layer of our comp from last time we've got the RGB and the alpha living in one layer with one set of effects we're using key light to not only pull the key but also create the spill suppression and eliminate the green and then we're adding some UN saturation and some curves and it's all happening on one layer that's great for the sake of simplicity but it's not good for having fine-tuned control and the ability to individually adjust things so what we're gonna do today is essentially just start over we're gonna start with a completely clean brand new key on this so go ahead and grab you're a keen to plate and drag it to your new comp button go ahead and jump to the end because that's really where we're most interested in in Brandon's hair detail go ahead and call this comp the matte and I will put key light on it as I did before key light yeah I will sample as I did before and we will switch to combine Matt and we're pretty much gonna stay in the combine Matt view going forward because we're only concerned with the Alpha at this point which is just this black and white representation of our transparency so I don't need to go to fun result again I don't need to ever really change this so just like last time I want to adjust the screen Matt and I want to clip the whites so that it fixes all this gray stuff in Brandon's shirt and in his face and I want to clip the black to try and get rid of all those dots and that looks pretty good that looks halfway decent this is essentially where we ended up last time before we started to finesse things right we have a good core Matt for Brandon hair doesn't look too good but the rest of them does alright so now let's duplicate this layer command D or control D on your PC and this one is gonna be set differently and let's go ahead and create some some names for them right now so this bottom one let's call this core and this top one let's call this hair and on this one I'm gonna reset monkey light altogether and I'm gonna be much more specific about where I sample my screen color and I'm gonna sample it right near Brandon's hair okay and that's because I'm not super concerned with you know this area out here or this area out here are mostly concerned with just the area immediately around his head all right and with that done I'm going to now switch to my combined mat and take a look at what I've got and you can see I've got some gray issues gray issues but that hair looks really good right it looks like nicely detailed and has all this nice translucent kind of stuff going on which is what I want I still want to eliminate these black dots but I shouldn't have to go very far with this I should be able to just go a very tiny amount just the tiniest bit and probably just back the white clip back just a little bit right not worried about these other dots really just worried about the dots in the immediate vicinity of Brandon's head and that's because I'm going to mask this layer and combine it with the the core layer underneath I can't just simply put a mask on it if I do it's gonna be weird keylight and masks really just don't like to behave nicely together it does this weird stuff and that has to do with our are clipping and our keying and all this it's just not it's not good right so we don't want to mask directly on the mat the the hair mat layer I want to create a new solid and like usual I make red solids for trap mats so this is gonna be a track mat for that hair layer so go ahead and hit okay take your opacity down to say 50% so we can see through it and just really quickly click and drag some tangents and make yourself a mask twirl down the mask attributes and turn on mask paths and you know every ten frames or so just good and reposition this mask it's important that you are repositioning the mask and not the layer if you're seeing these red handles on the outside when you move you're moving the layer you want to be moving the mask easiest way to do that would be to just select the word mask one down here and now that mask is actually selected so whatever I do to it is going to create keyframe so about every 10 frames like I said do your best to keep the dots out of this mask like right there if we have a few dots left in we can deal with those later might have to turn up the clip black just a skosh just do this real quick doesn't have to be perfect you just want to keep the crown of his head inside the mask shape at all times I'm gonna jump to my my halfway points here double check um you should not spend very long on this yeah all right that's good once you've got that garbage matted go ahead and turn your opacity back up to 100% and set this as the track mat for your hair layer so if you're not seeing if you're seeing switches and not modes go ahead and toggle over to modes and on hair set it to alpha matte red solid and I like to screen this layer on top of the layer underneath and it's really subtle if I've set this back to normal you're gonna see there's some holes in his hair but if I screen it it kind of fills that in and it's it's totally up to you it's gonna depend on the shot sometimes it's a screen sometimes it's normal the other thing I like to do is feather this this mask because you can get kind of a hard edge where the the two mats meet yeah you can see there's a little bit of a hard edge right there so I'll just feather this to soften that up and that should look pretty good we'll kind of revisit this screen versus normal thing in a bit but I'm gonna leave it for to screen for right now so that's our mat and really I have never done a professional green screen shot that worked with a single instance of a keyer and everything was beautiful and and perfectly mad at just with the single click of the mouse it just doesn't happen every every green screen shot out there is going to have problems and with this technique you can piece together a master mat that looks good for the entire shot might be hair it might be fingers it might be you know cloth it might be fabric it might be you know reflections glare or whatever you know glass whatever elements semi-transparent elements you have in the shot that you have to deal with this would be the way to handle it you set up a second keyer or a third keyer or fourth Kier you set up a track mat for it and you keep kind of piecing these things together to combine it I see I left a dot here in in this one I'm going to just clip that black just a little bit further on the core mat and that's the nice thing is now I can clip that black all day long and not really affect his hair too much it's affecting it a tiny bit but the the hair Matt is actually doing the majority of the work alright so that being said now let's go to the RGB side of the equation grab your plate one more time drag it and drop it into a new comp scrub to the end and this time we are going to use key light again but we're gonna use key light in a different way key light has an amazing spill suppressor and I just want to use it for its spill suppression purposes not for a keyer so in this case I'm gonna grab Q I drag and drop it on here and rather than using the eye drop or do not touch the eyedropper I want to simply choose the screen color and set this to maximum green easiest way to do that is down here in this this hex code type 0 0 FF 0 0 that's gonna max your green out and keep your red and blue at a minimum and you can see it does a really nice job of neutralizing that green and at the same time it's actually really significantly reducing the luminosity in the shot which is something we might have to deal with okay that's one of the problems with D spilling is that it actually affects luminosity we're not really gonna see it too much on this shot let me show you on a different shot one that I can't give you guys to work on I just don't have permission to but this is a this is a shot I worked on for music video a while back and you can see this is an interesting case because he's got a lot of green spill in his white shirt and on the chrome on the car and all of this stuff so when I simply D spill it put key light on it and again set the color to 0 0 FF to 0-0 you can see it really does a number on the car and on his shirt it really really chops down that that luminosity and it's not what we want it also introduces a lot of artifacts in the luminosity Channel it creates a lot of weird banding and stuff back there I don't really care that it's doing in the green screen I do care if it's gonna happen you know in his clothes in his face in the car and you can actually kind of see it in the car you're seeing like a lot of just compression artifact and a lot of noise and the windshield and in the roof and in the chrome in particular it just doesn't look good so the way to fix this is actually to to subtract the original and the D spilled version from each other so if I if I were to clone this just duplicate this layer and remove the key light from the duplicate and set it transfer mode to classic difference you'll see what I'm talking about this is the all of the luminosity that got removed this is this is the green right this is this is all the stuff that got removed by the spill the spill suppressor and with this I could you know desaturate it I could color corrected basic I can use this to put the light back into the shot that's missing so how that's that's gonna work on the Brandon shot here is I need to first of all duplicate that top layer remove the key light and before I do anything I'm gonna need this distilled version by itself I'm gonna need this D spill version all on its own okay in addition to what I'm about to do okay so take that the one that you've put the the D spill on in fact let's go ahead and call it D spilled and let's pre-comp it and we'll call it D spilled and we want to move all attributes into the new composition and hit OK all right go back to the previous count up you were working on what's called this one looma restoration hit okay so yeah now this top layer of your your plate sitting on top of the D spilled pre-comp go ahead and set that top one - classic difference should just give you the green this was actually shot pretty well it's not a lot of spill on Brandon so this step isn't going to make as big of a difference as it did on the dude surfing on the car shot a moment ago but it's still a good habit to get in because a lot of times there are these subtle luminance things happening on the subjects face or in their clothes that you're not seeing and this is ensures that you're not corrupting that luminance at all so I've set this to classic difference I want to make a new adjustment layer and on this I will put a hue and saturation and I'm just gonna knock it all the way down to minus 100 so it gives me a neutral gray so that's truly the luminosity that was removed by the spill the spill suppressor this you can color correct a little bit if you want I already know that our background has a kind of a hint of blue in it so using curves I can add a just a hint of blue not a ton just a hint and I can help with integration and this is another another place that you can mess around with with integration a little bit alright so now I have to combine the luma restoration and the D spilled so let's go back to our project take luma restoration and D spilled and let's put them together in a comp single comp make sure sequence layers is turned off hit OK and let's call this one RGB final hit ok and the luma restoration because it is just this right it's a black silhouette with the restored luminosity out here I just want to either add or screen this on top of the layer below right so you can see the difference that's the D spilled and then there it is with the lumen lumen restored luma restoration put back on top and how bright your environment is that you're gonna put him in will determine whether this is an ad or screen I generally like screen it's a little more subtle but that's your RGB final now so I've got my RGB final I've got my matte and it's time to combine them okay so let's grab matte and RGB final out of our project drag that to a new comp single comp hit OK and let's call this one master key jump to the end I don't want to see the matte okay you guys know this when we make a matte it usually goes invisible let's go ahead and make it invisible right now now normally we would do something like this set it to set the RGB final to use the luma of that matte layer as a track matte right that works pretty good I'm gonna undo that I don't want to do that in this case I want to use a different method and that's using an effect called set matte so go back to your effects & presets type in sect Matt and I'm going to use the set Matt effect drop it on RGB final I want to take the Matt from layer 1 and I want to use for Matt the luminance okay and that's gonna give me a pretty nice result let's go ahead and go back to our project grab our background drop that in here you get a pretty decent result the problem is you have that that halo on Brandon's hair and you might say well the simple fix would you just turn off that luma restoration and it's gonna just look better well it really isn't it's still not gonna fix it if I turn off luma restoration you over here doesn't really fix it I still have that issue um what this method gives me is because I've used the set map effect I can now use a an effect called a choker just type in the words the word Matt in your effects and presets and you'll see I've got some Matt tools I've got a Matt choker which is okay you can see it really shaves everything down I can adjust what's called geometric softness and it's it's almost like taking sandpaper to the whole edge I can adjust how much or how little I choke and I can just adjust how bright or how fuzzy that edge is right it's a this gray level softness is kind of controlling the brightness of that that the edge of that Matt and you know so you can fine-tune this but a lot of times it just makes the situation worse not better so Matt chuggers kind of obsolete I really would prefer to use the refine soft Matt tool I want to put that in on it really is going to improve things significantly okay you can see because it's got decontamination turned on decontaminate edged colors it really has taken out a lot of that that bright edge on it's head I can turn the decontamination up or down I don't have to have it at a hundred percent and in fact a hundred percent is probably just a little a little too aggressive and it really kind of it kind of smoothes out his hair too much and loses some of the fine detail and his hair that I was struggling so hard to keep so I probably turn my decontamination down just a smidge and that can help a lot you've got some additional smoothing feathering contrast edge shifting tools you can increase or decrease the edge but really if you've done your homework you over in that matte layer if you've really put in the work there then it's just a matter of adjusting the the decontamination amount on this to your taste to get it to look good you know you might want to I don't know just to turn up the contrast just a little bit maybe [Music] shift the edge in a little bit or out depending on which way looks good and you can kind of finesse that to your taste I think it works really well you can also turn off or turn on chatter reduction which can help particularly when you've got compressed video formats like something you shot on a cell phone or something and you've got a lot of movement the edges of your mat can chatter so Chado reduction can really bring that down and you can adjust that you can also turn turn on more motion blur which will help to improve that so what's really going on if I turn off my refined soft mat what's really going on with this edge is that if you look at let's just go ahead and look back at our original plate if I look at the edge Brandon's hair I'm seeing hair pixels and I'm seeing green screen pixels and then I'm seeing these pixels where you've got hair and green screen sort of translucently mixed together because of either because of things being out of focus things being motion blurred or just simply because hairs translucent right in reality if we were shooting Brandon on that haunted house background we wouldn't be seeing green pixels mixing with hair pixels we'd be seeing sky pixels or house pixels or or ground pixels intermingling with Brandon's pixels and that's what the the soft matte refining tool does this refined soft matte is that it kind of restores the original color of those edge pixels so that they can properly blend with the background alright so they can properly then blend with your new background and really show you what it would look like if we were seeing that background through Brandon's hair as opposed to seeing that D spilt green through his hair alright so play with that tool the refine soft matte tool it's gonna give you a lot of a lot of ability to control that edge I would probably fine-tune this a bit more probably probably shift that edge in just a skosh just to make that look a little bit better you know just kind of finesse these numbers until you get something that looks good I would caution you against feathering too much a lot of people think that feather is the answer feathering is going to cause a lot of problems all right so I wouldn't I wouldn't go too far with that so once you've got the this refined soft matte dialed in then your shots done and if we want to compare results let's zoom in on the hair in this version and zoom in on it on this version and you're just getting much more refined and naturalistic effects on the final version I will probably grab I do like the color correction that we put on Brandon so I'll probably grab the hue and saturation and the curves from last time and drop them onto this one and that's gonna look a lot better I mean just look at the front of his hair look at this particular spritz of his hair I think that looks so much better it's so much more naturalistic on our new version versus or old version and realistically the only new tool we use today was the refine soft matte tool everything else was just making combinations of things we learned how to do last time so alright hope that helps and happy King

Channel: Paul DeNigris

Views: 9,235

Rating: 4.8837209 out of 5

Keywords: filmmaker, tutorial, visual effects, vfx, adobe, after effects

Id: NjDcLNUVHR8

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 08 2018