Easy Green Screen Keying in After Effects CC

how's everyone doing hello welcome and thank you for joining me my name is Jason Levine wanted to talk to you about working with green screen footage and After Effects I'm gonna show you how you can use in particular a preset combination of effects that we released in After Effects gosh I don't even remember a couple of versions ago easily two to three years ago that really kind of take care of all the problems that we face when we work with green screen so let's get started shall we and we're going to begin with some footage that I shot of my colleague Michael shez and we were in the adobe studio in San Francisco which happens to be a green screen studio and I shot this footage that you see here with my nikon d800 so back over to effect some presets let's go ahead and type in just the word key and what you will see under animation presets image utilities is a combination preset called key light key cleaner and advanced spill suppressor so let's go ahead and drag this onto our clip of Michael now and once again now you'll see it adds three effects so key light the cleaner and the spill suppressor let's go ahead and take our eyedropper again let's go for a slightly brighter green this time I think this will give us a slightly better result and right away whoa that looks I mean it looks pretty good okay there's a little bit of haze and we're still seeing a little bit of that bleed but right away it really looks quite good now if we go back into our screen mat here again to check for the black and white level here all right we're gonna see we've got some problems up in the corners here that's barely coming through on the stream here but you can see this should really reflect solid black and you see there's some really nasty sort of pixelated gray and there we don't want that and again we're getting a little bit too much transparency on its face so I'll twirl down screen matte again I'll increase clip black just a bit okay clip white we're gonna drop that down again alright already looking so much better and maybe I'll even shrink the matte as well okay let's go back into our intermediate result and now it's starting to look really really good except we still have that green spill how do we tackle that easily truthfully that's one of the harder things to really combat well first before we even get there I want to talk about the CLE cleaner and the advanced spill suppressor because one of the things that the key cleaner is going to do it's gonna clean up again a lot of those kind of rough edges especially in a shot like this where the further back we get from the focal point it's already soft and typically what you might end up with is sort of noise because it's trying to figure out where the edges there's really no hard edges to kind of work off of here even though it's hair it's blurry hair because we're shooting at f28 so if I turn off the key cleaner I want you to see look at this this is what we were seeing before right jagged frightening scary bad 70s looking chroma King so just by turning on the key cleaner with the default results you can see that the edges look so much better they've got a couple of other settings here including additional edge radius you got alpha contrast and strength but let's go ahead and focus on this the advanced spill suppressor because with one single click just by turning this on it neutralizes all of that green okay before green and look at that look at the the reflection of the green onto his face here on the side you can see it very clearly and after pretty awesome right and look at the edges here look at this look at the sharpness now again you might think to yourself okay well that's cool however how come how come like where did it get the sample for that spill suppression what if the green is a different color ah excellent question because oftentimes the green or the blue that's reflecting onto the character is not in fact the same overall grain unless of course everything is really properly lit well by default with the spill suppressor here I'm using the standard method if I go ahead and switch to the ultra method this will actually allow me to take an independent spill key color okay now in the case of what we had here the standard was perfect look at that before after it's just neutralized it's gone now let me just go ahead and just play a little bit of this back because I wanted to talk about scrub through it here we have to play the whole thing scrub through a couple frames and actually it's it's actually looking really really good I mean just by defaults and someone might say ah but the the mask around the hair it's a bit soft okay so this is where we could again maybe shrink some of this okay and if you pay attention to the hair here drop this down right kind of choking it a little bit these are some controls that you'll also have in the ultra keyer in premiere alright it just happens to look really really good now I'm seeing a little bit of flicker inside the hair right here again the hair is quite soft because of that shallow depth-of-field so when you see like noise and stuff kind of percolating during playback that's when you want to enable this box here reduce chatter and I just want you to pay attention to this area right about here when I turn this on just on this still frame you're gonna see that it kind of took some of the edge off some of the noisy edge on that's on those hair sections right there maybe even compromised a little bit of the detail but again that's where you can start to apply the Alpha contrast percentage maybe reduce the additional edge radius control here and just refine that key a little bit more that's how we did that let's go to the finished version here where if you look at the effects let's go ahead and up to here you'll see that I've composite it's actually the background here this is nothing more than some Adobe stock footage and what we've got on here is just a little bit of luma tree color okay so the last thing I wanted to show you here is some footage of me the reason I brought this footage up is this was something that was shot of me quite a few years ago you may have seen this video online me singing welcome to Creative Cloud that's when this was from in my best 70s gear the reason I pointed this one out is because this while being a wonderfully late green-screen also done at the adobe studio here evidence is one of the problems that we have with bad green screen King which is hair and there's a fan going on in this shot so my hair is blowing it's quite wispy you can see there it's just like all over the place so you've got like all this hair all this wispy bits and again when your green screen King that stuff it can get real ugly if you don't know what you're doing right but this combination preset really takes a lot of that pain away and can honestly give you very nice-looking results with minimal effort so let's once again take this preset I'm going to drag it right on top of the clip here all right come up to key light grab our eyedropper again kind of find a neutral point green you can see it's a quite a bit darker in the corners quite a bit bright right here let's kind of choose something that's kind of in the middle like this all right and right away the key itself looks pretty good now before we get to the spill let's just kind of zoom in here I know you're saying ah look at all the green hold on we'll get to that want to show you once again the brilliance of the key cleaner right this is doing so much work for us let's turn that off ah look at all that look at that noise look at all that the jagged edges there look at that chest hair oh boy um I get very method when I do these things it's all about you know getting into the roll so I apologize for that in advance alright turn the key cleaner back on ooh nice and smooth you can still see strands of hair you just don't have all that harshness in there and then if we go ahead and turn on the advanced spill suppressor it neutralizes all that green just like that now just as with before I will likely go into my screen mat here and you can see again probably make some adjustments to very simply just to the clip black and clip wipe okay bring this up to around 10 and then again we're just getting a little bit of weirdness in here so maybe just roll this back not even you know not even that much yeah to around 89 or so again we're getting some like reflection in here and stuff on there on my my gold chains that's quite all right and that looks pretty good alright let's fit it back in here so without the key cleaner and without the spill suppressor ah again not a bad key but we're seeing this nasty green edge along my arm here all this spill all the spill in my hair I got a lot of blocky noisy stuff going on in the strands of hair turn on the key cleaner turn on the spill suppressor and even as I let's just go ahead and render see we can just render a few seconds of this I'm just gonna do just a couple seconds I'll let this render while I'm talking look at how brilliant oh my goodness so good I can't say the same for my dancing but I can say the same for the spill suppressor and the cleaner but again look at the hair I mean I just kind of focus on the hair what a beautiful key you know and you can actually see the background bleeding through nicely same with Michael again look here you can see that gray door peeking through his hair right as he's moving right so it's transparent where it needs to be but nice and sharp and clean where we want it all right so my friends that is all the time we have for this thank you so much for joining me today and we'll see you again next time thanks everybody take care

Channel: Jason Levine

Views: 399,936

Keywords: green screen, after effects, blue screen, tutorial, compositing, key, keying, keylight, effects, chroma key, beginner, masking, how to, spill suppression, edge, clean, hair, soft matte

Id: idgFCsnxa5U

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 10 2017