Compositing 1 of 3: Key a Green Screen in Final Cut Pro X

it's been houseful here and this is the first of three videos I'm doing on compositing in Final Cut Pro 10 now in this first video we're gonna be looking at how we create a basic green-screen how we move that green background from a video you've created in Final Cut Pro 10 we're gonna be using a not-so-perfect background so that we can kind of highlight some of the issues that pop up when you're kind of knocking out your green screen looking at how you get the perfect kind of mask for those videos in the second video we're gonna be having a look at how we work with double exposure in Final Cut Pro 10 and then in the third video we're going to be compositing at Hannah mating using the stupid raisins arrow pop plugin from FX Factory all these three videos are sponsored by FX factory so definitely go and check them out without further ado let's dive in and have a look at how we work with green screens in Final Cut Pro 10 so in this first of three videos we're going to be covering how to do the fundamentals of green screening so basically we're going to be knocking out the background of this video in which you can see me flying up here and basically in the other two videos we're gonna be having a look at some different compositing that we can do so the second video is gonna cover how we do this type of double exposure effect and in the third video it's gonna be all about how we animate a motion track these arrows popping on from the stupid raisins arrow pop plugin so basically we're gonna start a new project timeline here to work with then we'll call it green screen tutorial and 1080p and 1920 by 1080 is all perfect and I have recorded kind of a variety of different green screens in the past the one we're going to be using for today is actually a super quick version I did and basically it has lots of problems with it in terms of the lighting of it which is often the way that you kind of get that footage so we're gonna have a look at how to fix this which I think will be useful and for people who don't have that kind of perfect studio set up for their green screens so obviously normally you would want to stab your green screen so it's nicely lit and a bit flatter than it is in this particular example but it's the example we gonna go with so the first thing we need to do here is pop up background image onto our timeline so we're going to drag that down and then we'll drag down our green screen video I'm going to use the shortcut shift + Z to zoom into my timeline and then we going to trim this down and basically what I want is I've kind of pop my arms up in front here so we're gonna grab a little bit of this clip from before then I'm gonna drop the audio down and we'll just drag this back to the beginning and we'll finish this off just before I walk away so we have around five or six seconds of footage there to green screen so there's two main steps of this the first is to kind of knock out the green screen in the background of this video so to actually add a color key to this and select the color and key it out in Final Cut Pro 10 and the second is to use some of the masks to actually remove some of this extra area where we don't have a green screen around the edge but obviously we don't want power someone's hand kind of popping out in the background here so we'll come to our effects across on the right hand side you can toggle them on here and we will scroll down to keying first of all and we're going to use the color cure for this so basically you can see right from the get-go when I hover over it probably knows I want to use a green screen and so it's gonna do a kind of quick job of that when we kind of first start out so in Final Cut Pro we have a few different tools for working on the green screens so the first ones to mention these three different views so we have the composite so kind of what our videos gonna look like in the end and we have our mask and we can see we've got lots of kind of gray areas in the mask here as well which areas that are not completely kind of knocked out when we're actually working on this and then we have our original image and we're going to go to this just to select and sample some kind of areas here of our green screen so hopefully this will help to improve our green screen so you can see if we look at the mask here as we kind of modify this shape here we're improving what's being masked out so it's kind of making a better selection including all those kind of curves and folds in that green screen in the background so this sample color is super useful also if we go back to our original here we can sample our edges as well so basically we can hover this marker along the edge come to our mask and just kind of modify this until we're getting what we want and sometimes it will help and sometimes it won't but there you go so you can see here we're not really improving the finding of the edge there but if we add another one down here then hopefully these two different kind of edges will mean that we improve our mask a little bit so we are detecting the edges there and it's kind of helping a little bit but not a lot but what we can do is also fill the holes in our mask as well so we can use these sliders to actually fill air as the image where things are masking out properly we can change the edge distance I'm going to go to the composited version here and you can see we're getting a pretty good key of that background some of these areas of green might be a bit confusing they are not the green-screen they are actually lights in the video in the background so let's just pull this so we don't have quite so much green in the background and you can see we're getting a decent key there so we can also kind of work on the spill level and we'll come down to our map tools as well where we can kind of modify the contrast that map and it's also useful to come to this black and white image here as well to kind of see how we're improving the map with the mat tools that the contrast and everything like that and we can shrink it a little bit so sometimes if you see a little bit of green around your edges I'm just going to go to 100% view here then sometimes you might want to just shrink your mask a little bit or maybe go to minus one here we can also expand it out as well so you kind of get a bit of an outline there we'll go to minus one that will just kind of trim off some of the edges there and then we can also kind of erode the edges as well so that is the basics of adding the the green-screen here we also have kind of some tint suppression as well which basically you can see is adding magenta to the edge of our image here to get rid of the green to kind of counteract the green actually making my pants pink there so I'm going to leave that dialed down a little bit and then we might also want to do as well it's just kind of come in to our color correction here as well and basically if we hold down command on touch seven and we can bring up our color correction and we can also kind of just try and improve the color of our image so you might lose some of the the richness of your image when you actually add the key so sometimes just coming back in and adding a little bit of color correction to kind of get those levels working just right can be can be handy we are seeing the whole image here so really I'm using this as a guide but we're also seeing things in the background layer as well so let's hide our color tools here and so now you can still see we've got the hand there and everything like that so this is where we are gonna come back to fit and we are gonna come to our masks and we're going to use a draw mask for this so basically we're gonna drag a draw mask onto our layer and now sometimes the draw mask doesn't show up straight away if you come to the video tools then it can show off where you might need to kind of scroll down and make sure you've got the draw mask selected so you get that add control points option there and basically for this I don't need to draw all the way around I'm just making a mask and we'll zoom out a little bit here so we can come away from the edge we're just making a mask to mask out those other areas of the image so you can see without the draw mask we basically see the hand and the elevator here in the background but with the draw mask we've removed those other elements of the image and if we want we could feather it a little bit there might still be some bits of gray in the edge around here depending on how good your keying is for the the color key and so a little bit of feather in the draw mask isn't always a bad thing just to kind of make sure that you blend in to that background image as well I don't have any hard lines that pop up when you export things out so we'll scroll up and go back to our composite here and so now you can see we've got a pretty good key and mask for our image so if I get rid of this red line again if I did click at the top here on effects it will deselect the draw mask and I can now kind of play this through and we have a pretty good mask I'm having a look at the edges here I might also just kind of stretch this out I'm gonna hide these things across on the left and we'll go to 100% and then play this through I'm just pausing it sometimes on the playback things don't render in full quality you might sometimes notice a little bit of fuzziness around the edges so I'm basically playing it and then just pausing it to make sure the different parts of my video sharp and that actually looks pretty good so basically these are are keying effects in Final Cut Pro 10 we will go on in our next tutorial to have a look at how we kind of make this double exposure effect and then we'll have a look at how we kind of animate these green screen or kind of composited effects and to add a little bit more to it or one more quick thing as well backgrounds aren't always as saturated as your foreground so what I'll often do with a background here is if I come to my effects I might do two things one is grab a little bit of a Gaussian blur so the background is just a little bit out of focus and then also come into my color options and my exposure and just wash it out a little bit so just drop the contrast a bit so that basically your background is not more contrasty than your InFocus kind of foreground which is kind of a bit of a weird thing for someone flying over a city but there we go we might also reverse this clip as well so that we're kind of flying in the same direction as the cameras moving in the background as well to make it more realistic so that's a quick overview of how to green screen and we'll go and have a look now in the next tutorial how we create this double exposure effect and then we'll go on have a look at how I use the arrow pop tools from stupid raisins that you can get on effects factory

Channel: Ben Halsall: Final Cut Pro X & Adobe Tutorials

Views: 19,202

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Id: p7zKMzWPvQY

Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 02 2020