How to Green Screen in HitFilm 4 Express

you know I need this green screen for my tutorials and you are you keeping abling him hey guys and welcome to another very exciting stopstopstop someone turn on the green screen welcome to another very exciting visual effects tutorial using the awesome software package hitman for Xpress hitfilm for express unlike its bigger brother headphone for pro does unfortunately not include the advanced chroma key effect that is used to easily remove green screens from your shot however there is more than one way to eat a pancake and in this quick tutorial I want to show you how you can remove a green screen using hitfilm 4 Express if you want to avoid having to manually rotoscope shapes or animate masks frame while frame to extract or remove a moving object from your shot you're always best off using a green screen I have already covered why and how to use green screens in a separate video that you can and should check out by clicking on this link up here in the top left hand corner hit film for express is a great free tool for filmmaking and visual effects and while it does not contain dedicated chroma key tools you can still achieve the same effect in just a few simple steps while this is going to be a beginner tutorial I will assume that you have at least watched my absolute beginner tutorial for hit before Express but now before you get so bored that you wander off to actually go get a pancake let's jump right into the tutorial hats little comment so hit filthy Express and just as you going what the no this is not going to be a tutorial in German however even hit Finn for express is a free software tool and lots of people like to use it if you do want to see someone to Charles for it just leave me a comment down below and I will see what I can do to get started with this tutorial though let's first import our footage let's come into the media panel simply double-click into some empty space and it will bring up the Open File dialog let's select our super Walther clip and as always if you do want to follow along with this tutorial you will find a download link to this clip in the description of the video then hit open to import the file into your project and to bring this clip into our timeline let's simply drag and drop it in at the very beginning if he trim for express pops up this dialog telling you that the editor sequence settings do not match the clip it simply means that well you're configured project does not match the clip you're trying to use either in the resolution the pixel aspect ratio or the frame rate so in most cases you simply want to say yes and hit film will automatically update you editor sequence or your timeline panel to match the clip that you've dragged in in terms of all of the settings let's zoom in a little bit and play this clip back and this is simply the clip of water dreaming of being Superman before he gets busted as I have covered in my absolute beginner tutorial for hit film for express the editor timeline is for sequentially aligned you eclipses for editing and in order to composite a visual effect shot you need to convert your clips to composite shots in order to convert this clip that we have here the super water clip into a composite shot simply right click and select make composite shot let's rename this one to super water comes a shot and a composite shot is really just the equivalent of a composition in After Effects let's hit OK and here we are inside the composite shot and it currently only contains a single layer which is our super Walther clip you will also notice the newly created composite shot showing up in the media panel but for now let's concentrate on extracting water from the shot and removing the green screen so we can composite him onto something that looks similar to clouds to create a really cool Walters Superman effect for that come up into the left-hand side of the viewer panel and select the freehand mask tool let's zoom out a little bit and let's draw a mask around Walter BAM and Walter is cut out let's scrub through the clip to just make sure that the blow-dryer doesn't come into the shot at the top but that actually looks alright if it did we could always adjust the mask as needed and make sure that we're not cutting up Walters hands but nothing else gets into the shot cool that looks all right let's zoom back in and let's get rid of the green screen let's come over into the effects panel let's go down a little bit to the keying tap expand the keying tap and we are going to apply a hue and RGB key to this layer to apply the effect simply drag it onto the super water layer and let go and that's really not what we want looks like some kind of retro American presidency poster Walter for president obviously the default settings for this effect will not do so let's come into the controls panel and in here you will find the properties for the currently selected layer and all of the effects that are applied to it so down here at the bottom and the effects you will find the hue and RGB key and you can technically also change it up here in the layer panel within the cops'll shot directly but I like to do it through the controls panel so let's expand the hue and RGB key as you can see the color to key artists clearly set to red which is absolutely not what we want we want to get rid of the green screen and set so let's click and hold on the color picker and a drag the color picker onto a fairly bright area of the green screen and let go BAM and the green screen is gone let's zoom in and cool that has actually done a pretty good job of removing all of the green screen now the edge around Walder is a little bit rough and so the two main parameters in the hue nagy be key that you can tweak are the tolerance which will increase and decrease how much of the green you are going to key out and you can also adjust the edge softness which will simply determine how smoothly the edge is between water and the green screen that were removing I think I'm going to bring the tolerance down just a little bit more just tweak this a little bit and yep this is actually not too bad another very useful tool for keying this out cleanly is also at the bottom of the hyun RGB key you will find a view map option this will show you very clearly which areas of the LEI are going to be included and which ones are going to be removed up here at the top I can actually see a little bit of I believe it's the tip of Selena's blow-dryer so what I am going to do is I'm - zoom back out and I'm going to select my mask and I'm just going to bring the mask in just a little bit more to make sure we get rid of that as well let's zoom back in check this out and I think that is actually a pretty good key let's disable the view map option again and return to green screened Walter and the last thing if i zoom all the way back in you can see that there's a little bit of a green spill on water on the side of the shirt just around his head in the hair a little bit so I do definitely want to get rid of that as well for that let's return to the effects tab and within the keying you'll find a mat enhancements so let's expand that and under mat enhancement we are going to find a spill removal so let's drag the spill removal onto the super walther layer let go and did you notice the difference so you can toggle the effect off you can see the green edge on this hand the shared back of his head if I turn this spill removal on all of that green nastiness is gone so now let's zoom all the way back out and scrub through out comes a shot and that actually looks pretty good let's collapse the super water layer and now let's add a cool cloud backdrop that's kind of flying past Walter and then we're going to add a few clouds over him just to kind of add a little bit of this flying through the sky effect first let's create a sky colored background for that let's create a new layer and let's create a new plane let's call this one sky the color change it to something that you would imagine the sky to be let's hit OK okay and let's drag the sky plane below Walton so water's just up against this bright blue sky and just to make this look a tiny bit more interesting coming to the effects tab and let's search for the color gradient effect and apply that to the sky plane let's go over into the controls and expand the color gradient effect I'm going to bring down the opacity just the effect is a little bit more subtle I just want a little bit of a sky gradient effect going on but of course feel free to tweak this in any way that you like let's collapse the sky plane and let's create another layer and let's create another plane this one I am going to call clouds and to change the color to black and hit okay I'm going to drag the clouds just below super water but above the sky plane let go so now water is on black and we're going to add some animated clouds that are flying past onto this plane and then blend it all together with the sky background for that again let's return to the effects panel and let's search for the fractal noise effect and let's apply the fractal noise effect to the clouds plane let go and yeah it kind of looks cloudy ish not quite for one I want to change the structure a little bit and obviously I want to have these clouds flying past water as if he's zipping through the clouds so let's come back into the controls panel expand the settings for the fractal noise effect and expand the transform and the transform allows you to move and rotate and zoom in and out these clouds so I'm going to scale the clouds down just a little bit so the clouds in the background are a little bit smaller and then I'm going to expand the appearance tab let's bring down the offset to make the whole clouds layer a little bit darker and maybe I'll bring down the exposure a little bit as well maybe offset could be a bit brighter and now let's change the blend mode from none over to screen and nothing at all happened and the reason nothing happened is because we change the blend mode of the fractal noise effect so with the fractal noise is going to be screen blended onto this layer however the whole layer is still just solid blender there's no transparency there's nothing so you still get black and just a few clouds so in the fractal noise we can actually change the blend mode back to normal this does not make a difference let's just collapse the fractal noise effect again and let's expand the layer properties and these are the properties for the clouds layer and in here you will find a blend mode and this is the blend mode for the clouds plane for this whole layer so let's change this from normal over to screen BAM and water is flying through the clouds but it doesn't look realistic yet because the clouds aren't moving yet so let's fix that next let's go back to the beginning of the composite shot come back into our controls panel let's collapse the layer properties and re-expand the frac noise under transform you will have a position tab so let's expand this is again fractal noise transform position let's expand this and I'm quickly going to disable the visibility of my bottom sky plane so we can see the clouds a little bit more clearly so now in the fractal noise transform position you have a position property and if we move the Y position downwards we can make the clouds move what we can do is we can animate the position property off the fractal noise this will then make the clouds move downwards continuously and it'll look as if water's zipping through the clouds and for that make sure you at the beginning of the composite shot and you will notice that in the controls panel a lot of properties have this little circle next to them this is equivalent to the stopwatch icon in After Effects and on the position property if you click this this will enable keyframes for the position property and it has already created a keyframe at our current cursor position in order to see the keyframe in the clouds layer and the effects let's expand the fractal noise and down expand the transform and expand the position and there is this little diamond here represents a keyframe at frame 0 and while we're at this position I'm actually going to change my position to 0 0 again and let's scrub to the very end of our composite shot and let's lower this and this is going to create another keyframe on this property so let's set this value to something pretty small to minus 10,000 maybe and now if we scrub through the composite shot you can see the clouds fly past Walter it doesn't actually look too bad but the one thing I'm really missing is the motion blur on the clouds just to add some velocity the water just really shooting through the sky fortunately hit food for Express includes effects for that so let's come into the effects panel and let's search for blur and you have a number of different options you can actually apply a motion blur itself which will calculate the motion blur based on the pixel movement within the layer but it is quite computationally expensive and all of the clouds are always just moving downwards so we know exactly which angle the blur should always be so what we can use is we can use the angle blur instead so let's come up a little bit let's collapse the cloud plane just so it's a bit easier to manage let's apply an angle blur to this layer come back into the control panel and let's find the angle blur there it is let's expand the angle blur let's change the angle to point downwards to a hundred and eighty degrees so the blur will smear our clouds downwards and let's jack up the length to maybe around 150 I do want this effect to be pretty noticeable so let's rewind our composite shot and play this back and that looks much more energetic let's again collapse the cloud plane and re-enable our sky the clouds are pretty subtle in the background but they really do add to the overall feeling of movement next given that we want to convey the feeling of water flying through the clouds that would imply there would probably be some clouds in front of him as well right now it's still very much looks like water sustaining in front of a backdrop with some moving clouds so let's play some clouds in front of him for that let's select the clouds plane let's duplicate it with control D same as an After Effects and let's drag this cloud plane above super water so now we have some clouds in front of him as well however I do want to tweak to small things for one let's go back to the beginning of the composite shot in the controls panel with the clouds layer on the top selected let's expand the effects and the fractal noise and let's change the seat to randomize these clouds so the clouds in the foreground don't have the exact same pattern as all of the clouds in the background and in the composite shot let's expand the cloud layer effects and come into the fractal noise let's go into transform and expand the position property and this is where we have the two key frames that control the movement of the clouds now I do want the clouds in front of water to move a little bit faster than the one in the background it'll just add a little bit to that feeling of death so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come to the end of the composite shot to the last keyframe that we've keyframe to minus 10,000 I'm going to set that to maybe minus fifteen thousand just to let the clouds in front of water move a little bit faster let's rewind and play this back cool that actually looks pretty good the last thing I want to tweak is Walters color he doesn't quite fit in with a cloud in the background he's a bit too dark and a bit too whitebalance he doesn't quite fit in with this overall shot for that let's collapse all of the layers in our complete shot again and come over into the effects panel in here let's search for the curves effect and let's apply it to the super water layer let's come back into the controls panel let's under effects find the curves effect and expand it let me make this panel just a little bit bigger and here are the curves and I have covered how to use curves in my color correction and color grading tutorials and I've got quite a few of those on my channel already so you can go check that out if you don't know how to use this what I'm going to do is I'm going to make water a fair bit brighter because I do want him to blend in a bit better with that sky maybe a little bit more contrast and I'm going to come up in the channels I'm going to change this over to my red channel and I'm going to pull out some red to tint Walter a lil bit blue just so you blends in a little bit nicer with that background so what we have water without the curves kind of stands out it doesn't really fit in and with the curves he blends into the whole shot a whole lot better of course I'm keeping all of this fairly basic there's still quite a few things that you could do to make this shot look better but I think for this tutorial that should suffice finally let's collapse all of our layers return to the beginning of our composite shot and let's play back our final Super Walter effect and it's as easy as that I really hope you enjoyed this tutorial and as always if you do have any comments questions or suggestions just leave them down in the section below if you did enjoy this video I would greatly appreciate it if you could give it a thumbs up favourite it and share it with the world if you do want to see more cool filmmaking and visual effects tutorials don't forget to go to youtube.com/scishow and subscribe thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later you

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 125,108

Keywords: HitFilm 4 Express, Tutorial, Green Screen, Superman, Flying, Clouds, Visual Effects, VFX, Special Effects, How To, Instructions, Film Making, Composite Shot, Beginner, Surfaced Studio

Id: X1ayXCMXj4s

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 16 2016