Green screen compositing in Final Cut Pro X

this tutorial requires beginner-to-intermediate skills and we will be using Final Cut Pro hi everyone this is max from max nose calm and in this episode we're going to take a look at compositing in Final Cut Pro by the way my neighbor is rebuilding on top here so you might hear some hammers slamming and stuff but anyway as a base for this project we're going to use this clip of Skeletor it's a Halloween makeup created by Eleanor sander of the LM x SFX Channel and a good thing to point out here that a good result on a composite like this is really dependent on how you like your subject if you know what kind of background you are going to use make sure you light your subject to match that background that's very important and also think about focal lengths if you have a real wide angle background you're going to add make sure you shoot your subject with a wide angle lens to easier match up the whole perspective now let's break this down we have Skeletor here of course this is a nice little clip and for our background I'm going to be using this JPEG file that I license from an image Bank it's a basic still image and to give the whole scene some good feel we also have a video clip of some dusts this is a part of a plug-in I'm using and this is some smoke as well so these are the elements we are going to be using we take this little piece of our clip and pull it down to our timeline like that there is Skeletor great now and to get rid of all this green stuff here we need to use something called a keyer we find that over here to the right and our effects section and we scroll down to keying right there and there is our keyer now if we drag that on to our clip Final Cut is smart enough to know that we are planning on removing the green but it doesn't quite remove all the extra junk so we need to help Final Cut to understand what we want to remove so we select our clip go to our effects panel and the inspector and fold out the keyer here we have a lot of different options I'm gonna go through them really really fast here and I want you to experiment with them on your own first of all we can refine the samples of colors and what's to remove with these tools up here next up is the general strength how much to remove and then we jump to the view settings right now we are viewing the whole composite we can also view the actual mask or the mat as it's called and this works pretty much the same as the masks in Photoshop the layer masks anything that is black is going to be removed from your footage and anything that's white is going to be left in the shot and we can also click the original here so we have a few options let's keep it at composite mode so we see the whole scene the fill holes function and edge distance is used if you have clothing or hair that kind of becomes transparent when it shouldn't be then you can use the fill holes function and edge distance to fill in those holes automatically the spill level is if you have a lot of green cast light coming onto your subject you can change that here see it goes to purple and on the other way if you've been using a blue screen you might want to pull it towards the green get rid of some of that color spill then you can use this guy here we'll leave it at pretty much basic settings for now further down we have the color selections you remember Final Cut knew we were going to remove the green but in case you work with other colors this is where you set those colors and tell Final Cut what to remove there is a lot of settings for that as well so you can tweak and mix and fix to get your colors right then we have the mat tools and the mat tools effect just going to switch back to the mat here the mat tools affect the look of our mask so with this levels adjustment we can adjust the contrast of the mask if we zoom in very far II like 300% and move out to the edge here look at the edge if I adjust the settings you see it pulls in and pulls back and does all kinds of shifts so here you can balance out and mix your edges and your mask until it suits your needs and we will be using this in a little while so just hold on and just zoom out again alright and here we can shrink and expand the whole selection to include or exclude more or less up the shot we also have a soft and tool that softens all the edges in the whole shot like this everything becomes blurry and that means if we go to our clip we get this little fuzzy blur around it also we have an erode function that actually does the same kind of blur but from the edges and inwards so if I pull it you see it kind of moves in there and get a little bit of softness on the inside of our mask so that's the math tool switch back to composite view and then we have the spill suppressor and that's pretty much helps with removing any color casts or helps you match up the clip in terms of light and shadow and exposure as well as color casts you can also switch it here to make sure that your subject matches your background and the light wrap functionality I'm going to show you in a little while because for that we're going to need the actual background so there you go that's a quick rundown of the keyer settings and we're going to use a few of them so let's begin I'm going to use the sample color feature here to tell Final Cut that I don't want this stuff to be here so I click the sample color and I make a little selection here covering those color tones as well and we have effectively removed our back that's pretty awesome and before we continue let's get our background in there as well so we actually see how the edges match up and everything so we go to our jpg file and we want that behind Skeletor so we grab it and pull it down underneath like that and drop it just going to fix the duration so we also see that the clip doesn't really cover our whole screen so let's scale this up a bit maybe move it around to somewhere yeah like there that's good so let's just keep it at that and head back to our Skeletor clip now we see that we have some problem edges here we zoom in like this go over here we see that we have this little white edge here doesn't look very good so we're going to return to one of the tools we talked about earlier namely the Matt tools so we're going to increase that contrast on our little key and pull down the blacks a little as well as our mid-tones and you see that little white edge just disappeared looks much cleaner and much smoother with all this zoomed in I'm going to show you what the light wrap feature is so if Skeletor was standing there in the nice little mountain scene some of this light might actually hit his cloth here so what the light wrap does is actually that you can pull off the amount and you see that light and the color from the background image sneaks up over his cloth there over the edge and you might not want to go bananas and do it this much because then it's going to get like a halo glow feature so you can always use the opacity and the intensity to pull back and adjust until you get something that actually mixes him in with the background I tend to like the overlay feature which works in a little different way than normal mode let's see you barely see it but you see the kind of comes over here might be hard to see in this video but I kind of like the overlay feature a lot better it's more subtle but depending on what you're doing the other normal screen lighten and hard light might be better for you so let's stick with this for now and zoom out the whole thing and check what we got so let's play our clip this looks pretty good don't you think yeah no funny edges playing any tricks on us now so I'm satisfied so to make the scene more interesting let's add some smoke right behind him then that smoke needs to be on top of the background but behind Skeletor so we take our smoke clip I have this little section I like and then we drag that and place it underneath Skeletor but over the background just going to make sure they are the same length there like that but as we see the whole scene got messed up now all we have is smoke and that's kind of bad and that brings us to another great feature when it comes to compositing namely blending modes so I select my smoke clip and the timeline I go out to my inspector and pull all the way down to compositing that's what we're doing now the blend mode here changes the way your clip reacts to what's beneath it so you can play around with all these little different things here like if we take multiply we see the smoke Khanna yeah it's there but doesn't quite do the trick for us now I happen to know that the screen or add feature is what we're going to do so let's click the add looks like the smoke disappeared but it didn't if I play it yep the smoke is right there behind Skeletor and that's pretty awesome and of course if you think the smoke is too intense you can always dial it back a little let's see yeah looks pretty good they're floating around behind him so now for added 3d effect let's add that dust I was talking about before kind of looks like snow and it fits our little scene very well so let's pull that down and we want this on top of the Skeletor because we want this in front of him all right and again we have the same problem there with our clip covering the whole thing so again we go out to our inspector all the way down and choose add in this case because we want the white stuff to be seen and the black disappear and we play yep these subtle little dust specks or snow flakes appear in front of Skeletor and the smoke behind it at this stage you can be ready if you want to but we want to match this up even further so if we think about it if we would have shot Skeletor like this against a mountain backdrop odds are that those mountains would be a little bit more blurry and not so sharp right so let's let's add some blur to them go out to the effects section find ourself some blur and I'm going to go with Gaussian blur this time we pull that and drop it onto our mount and clip all right that's way too much so let's head out to our inspector and dial that down I just want the mountains to be not so sharp it's just a matter of a tiny bit of blur like that maybe that's too much even gonna stick it to there you might not think it's a big difference but if we turn it off then on again yeah it's a tiny tiny bit blurry and that adds to the realism and now let's do two more things before we finish up a good thing to do is actually to color correct all these clips at the same time so they get the same color treatment and contrast and everything and to do that we need to select everything by just dragging over our Clips like that then we right-click and create a new compound clip boom we can name it to whatever we want click OK and now final cut smacks everything together into one single clip now the compound clip behaves like any other normal final cut clip and you can of course double click on the clip to get down into all the separate ones and you can of course go right back out like that to get back to normal and if you want them as separate clips again you can always go up to the clip menu and go down to break apart clip items and then they will separate and become separate again anyway we want it as one right now so that we can color adjust the whole thing at one single time so we go out to the right here and find ourselves some color correction tools there is our color correction board we drop it onto our compound clip and go out and open the color board now we can adjust a little bit of contrast here pulling up the whites pulling down the blacks maybe and maybe we want to give the whole thing a little cool purple color cast on the shadows like that and everything is going to affect the full clip and all the clips underneath so that's pretty cool makes it look like all the clips came from the same place more or less so there you go now I happen to have a little lens flare plugin from motion VFX and I'm going to drop that in so that you can see that we have a lot of options here now this one looks crazy so let's just drop that on there I'm dropping it onto the whole compound clip just adjusting it so that flare comes from the moon yeah so now we get this amazing flare effect as well might not be that amazing actually but it's pretty cool and there you have it compositing in Final Cut Pro I hope you liked this video and that it wasn't too much to take in but it's just you play around with all these features and see what you can create and of course you can mix up clips they don't have to be green-screen clips you can mix up anything so go ahead play around see what you can create so I'll see you next time and if you like this video give it a thumbs up and please subscribe take it care goodbye

Channel: Macs Knows

Views: 42,738

Keywords: how-to, tutorial, education, learn, easy, free, professional, final cut pro, fcpx, compositing, green screen, special effects, smoke, dust, blending mode

Id: -Yin7yGU7fo

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2016