(dramatic music) (hands slap on face) (contemporary music) - [Kris] Hey, what's up guys? Welcome to another Tutorial Thursdays. We're gonna talk about something that I've actually been
holding off for quite a while. I don't know why, but
it's been highly requested so here it is. I just set up a green
screen in my living room and we're gonna talk a little
bit about that experience and some keying tips on tomorrow's video. Definitely you don't wanna miss that but for now we're actually
diving in to the tutorial part, the post side, and we're
gonna look at a few techniques and a few effects within After Effects so completely stock that can help you in pretty much any keying scenario. So I'm gonna try to run through it and I'm gonna try to keep it short, but there's definitely
gonna be a lot of info packed into this one that
can hopefully help you in your worst nightmare
green screen situation. So over here I pretty much
step into the green screen and I am, I'm looking really,
really distraught here by whatever is in front of me. So, not sure what we're
gonna be adding into this but let's focus on
getting rid of this green and the living room for now. So the first step that you wanna do is get rid of the excess. So a garbage mat, I'm sure
you're seen this done before. You just select the pen tool up here and we're just gonna pretty
much select around our subject. Notice how I'm also getting
rid of this shadow over here and a little bit of that hot spot. And by the way guys, I did a full tutorial on how to properly light a green screen. This is not how you do it. What you're seeing right now is not a perfectly lit green screen. I just really wanted a
challenge for ourselves so that we can actually go
through a few techniques here. Okay, so we have a garbage mat. Sometimes you can be a little bit closer, you can make this a
little bit more redefined. But since I know that I am
stepping into the green screen I don't wanna actually cut off any parts. So you can see that I'm gonna
have to do some adjusting here for my top part of the bun. People have been telling me to cut it, maybe it's time to cut it 'cause it's making me do more post work. But something that you might wanna do is you can see how I'm
extending a little bit of these points because we can actually
hit M on our keyboard and click on the stopwatch
for the mask path and this way it creates a key frame and we can actually animate this mask so that we're closing it in. But you can see that there's
a little bit of arm movement so you wanna be mindful of that. But we can definitely
lose all of this side. So we can maybe bring this in a little bit so that we're not, ya know
working with so much information and we're just focusing with
that's around our subject. So the next step is adding keylight. So I'm gonna go under
my effects and presets. And by the way, before I go any further, I'm using After Effects CC 2019. I believe that most of the features if not all of the effects
that I'm using today come with any other CC version and maybe even some prior versions, but it's definitely worth upgrading. So definitely keep that
in mind and if you do, I really would appreciate
it if you use the link in the description. So, let's type in keylight and let's add that to our footage. So the first step is
selecting the screen color. So I'm gonna select this pick whip and I don't wanna select
something that's near the edge or a hot spot or the shadows. I kinda wanna select a color that represents my green screen. So sort of an average of what
I have in my background here. So I'm gonna select this green right here and you can see that already
it's doing a pretty solid job. Of course, this looks horrible
but we got rid of the green and that's, that's a good first step. Before we go any further I wanna actually change from final result to screen map. The reason I'm doing this is
because this is gonna give us a much clearer view of
what we're actually doing and how we're effecting
the colors, the pixels, and the alpha information in our scene. All it is is showing us what is opaque and what is transparent. So white is fully opaque and
black is fully transparent. The gray is anything in between that we usually wanna eliminate. Sometimes you can have
some gray around the edge and around hair or maybe some elements that have a little bit of
motion blur and that's okay. But for the most part we
wanna get rid of all of this, we wanna make sure that
this is completely white, and that all of this
surrounding our subject is completely black. So there's a few settings
right inside of keylight that you can adjust to make sure that you're
getting a good key. So I'm gonna expand the screen map, and the first two that
we're gonna focus on is clip black and clip white. And I'm just gonna increase the clip black until I see that most of this is gone. I'm gonna do the same thing for clip white but I'm just gonna go backwards. And there we go, this is pretty nice. We can see that most of the problematic
parts of our green screen our outside of our garbage
mask, so that's really good. Now sometimes you might
get some dead pixels or just some random noise
and some holes into, into your subject or maybe
even some opaque parts that are showing up in your green screen. This is where you can kind of
mess around with despot black and despot white but I
wouldn't go too far with these because it gets pretty clumpy
and pretty nasty real quick. So right now in my case fortunately, I don't have any of that but you can mess around
with this a little bit but I'm also gonna show you other ways later on in this tutorial
on how to refine the edges and how to refine any possible spots or anything that you have on your subject. So let's take a look at
the intermediate result. It's looking pretty clean, pretty clean. Now it's not perfect
yet but as a first step this is looking pretty nice, especially considering
how I am out of focus. Did not really plan on
doing that but ya know, and by the way there's
actually a lot of steps that you wanna make
sure that you're taking when shooting your green
screen footage so we are, we're gonna take a look at that tomorrow. This is just a bad
example that we're using but we're gonna make this work but keep in mind that there's a few tips that you definitely wanna make sure to do when you're shooting your footage in order to have success in post. Now before moving on to the other effects, I just wanna click through here and make sure that I don't
have anything weird going on, especially around the hair or any part that's moving really fast, you just wanna click through
your sequence and your timeline and you wanna make sure that ya know you're getting a pretty
clean key all around. Now of course there's some issues here which we're gonna fix right now. To clean up these edges and this key, we're gonna use a key cleaner. So here it is. I'm gonna drag it into my footage. It's gonna take a little
bit to load and there we go. So it's, it's not really, we're not really paying too much attention to the green hue of it. We're gonna take care of that later, but for right now we wanna make sure that the edges are cleaned
up, they're not as harsh, and that they can blend
in to whatever composition we're adding behind it. So let's take a look before and after. Now it's not perfect. It's essentially just blurring out and softening the edges a little bit but we can definitely
make some adjustments. So we can reduce the chatter and just by selecting that box it's gonna smooth out any
moving parts around our edge. I don't know if you've
noticed this in your keys or in other people's keys but sometimes there tends to be a lot of
fuzziness moving around, especially around the edges. So reduce chatter, checking this box will definitely help a lot with that. Now you can mess around
with the alpha contrast. So we can just crank this way up just to show you what it does. So in our scenario maybe we wanna do like something like 15%. That's looking pretty good. We can also decrease the strength if we think that it's, it's ya know hurting our
footage a little bit too much but I'm gonna keep it pretty high up, especially consider that our shot is a little bit out of focus. So this is looking pretty good. Just wanna look around
the creases of my shirt, making sure that everything is good. Everything is looking
nice as far as the edge. Now we're still getting
that greenish hue around me so we're gonna fix that
with the next effect. So under effects and presets I'm gonna look for
advanced spill suppressor. There it is. I'm gonna double-click on that, that's just gonna add it to our footage and take a look at what that does. Pretty great consider the
issues that we were having. So I'm gonna uncheck it. You can see that really nasty green spill making its way into the edges. If I activate the advanced spill
suppressor, pretty amazing. And by the way this is a
black background but of course if I toggle this transparency
grid switch down here you can see that we're,
ya know, it's transparent. Drop a background right
below our keyed footage. This is a matte painting
I did and by the way guys, if you wanna learn how
to make stuff like this, like all these environments
and these spaces, which could be really great
to tell your scifi story or whatever else, or
even expand your world and kind of achieve a higher budget look, without spending a bunch
of money and just ya know, expanding your world this way, let me know because I've been thinking about doing a matte painting workshop and it could be really interesting. But anyways for now, let
me not get carried away. I just wanna match this footage as best as I can to this background. Now this is not what
this tutorial is about so I'm gonna just really
do it very quickly and I'm just gonna show you
a few very quick effects that you can add that can help
you get closer to that goal. So here I'm just gonna first
start with the contrast. So I'm just gonna try to
set my luminance value to something that can be a
lot closer to this background. Something that helps is
expanding the info box over here, this panel and here you
can see that we have a box that essentially previews
us what color we're on with our cursor and we have an RGB and alpha value information here as well. So I'm gonna go over my black T shirt since this is the darkest
color that we have in our keyed footage and
I'm gonna take a look at what these numbers up here are. And I'm gonna try to get really close to whatever values are in my darkest area of my matte panting. So you can see that we're pretty close, it just takes some fine
tuning and some tweaking. And of course, sometimes it
doesn't have to be exact. For example here, I'm gonna make my subject
a little bit darker because I kinda wanna add
a sense of atmosphere. So our foreground element has
a little bit more contrast than what's in the background because things that get further away usually have a lot less contrast. So I'm not gonna spend too much time tweaking around with this. You get the main idea with that. So let's move on to the red channel and essentially I'm just
slowly taking away colors that are not really
present in the background. So you can see this is very muted and it's kinda monochromoatic. Has a lot of just blue highlights. But it does have some reds. So I wanna make sure that
I'm staying true to that. Of course, I'm doing this with complete disregard to the skin tones. I'm just showing you how to
do a very, very basic match. Another thing that I've
kind of experimented with and that actually helps a
lot is adding a tint effect and I'm gonna select a
brighter color around here and I'm gonna select a
darker color around here. And then I'm just gonna
decrease the amount of tint. I'm gonna add another one once again. I'm gonna just keep picking
colors that are in my scene until I get a blend that is pretty nice. And then maybe darken the black here. Brighten this. So you can kinda keep
playing around with this but you kinda see where I'm going. I'm starting to introduce some
colors that are in my scene and I'm just gonna keep doing that with a bunch of other effects. But the main ones that I
use are curves, some tint, some hue and saturation, and
sometimes I go into Lumetri which is really powerful
for doing this kinda stuff. But again, I just wanna, I
just wanna get to a point where this looks somewhat acceptable. Of course, all the
hardcore color correctors and everyone else is gonna drill me but I'm not trying to do that right now, I just wanna get a finished result that looks somewhat okay
and that can show off what a good job we did with our key. I do wanna show you one more trick. I'm just gonna leave it like this. It's not good at all
but I just wanna move on and show you one last thing and I'm gonna create a new solid. And in here I'm gonna select a color that is closest to my
highlights of my scene and I'm gonna click Okay. I'm gonna turn it off for now
and I'm gonna scale it up. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a circular shape around this highlight over here. So something like that. And then move this shape
a little bit closer here. I'm gonna turn it back on and I'm going to feather
the edges out quite a bit like a lot, move this up a little bit,
and set this to screen. Now let's say that we don't want it to affect
our background like this. It's kinda losing its impact but we do like how this
light is kinda falling off onto our subject since it's making it fit a little bit more into our scene. What we can do is we can
duplicate our footage with the green screen,
place it above our solid that we just created,
and then tell it to look at the alpha matte of our footage. So we're gonna set the solid track matte to look at the alpha matte and now you can see that it's
only affecting our subject. So if I move this solid around you can see that it's contained
only within our top footage. Now this is very extreme
of course but you can see that you can add nice little
highlights here and there that can, that can
really make your footage match a lot better with
the lighting of your scene. Now of course you're looking at an example that was shot completely blind, meaning not knowing what
I was gonna put behind it. So if you're shooting this, obviously spend the time to
do the proper lighting on set when you're shooting it and
ya know have a reference photo and just try to get it really close. So I would put maybe a light ya know, like an LED panel or a
spotlight or something that can get me a little
bit of an edge over here that would make sense with
this highlight over here, something maybe here for the face and I would definitely do
a much moodier lighting. So ya know it all starts from there but of course these are some effects that you can add to your footage to really help in terms of
compositing it into your scene. So I could ramble on and
on about compositing this into the scene. That's not what this tutorial is about. I hope you learned something about keying and hopefully it will help you in whatever situation you're in. These sets of effects
have definitely helped me in my career and any time I
need to green screen anything. And definitely tune into tomorrow's video because I'm actually gonna
be sharing the 10 key tips of what you need to do
whenever you're shooting with a green screen. So you definitely don't
wanna miss out on that because it's gonna have
a lot of information on what to do in order to
give you the best results when you're later dealing
with the footage in post. Alright guys, that is it for me for now. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this Tutorial Thursdays and I will see you tomorrow. (dramatic music)
