How to Green Screen in HitFilm Express - In-depth Beginner Tutorial

hey everyone and welcome back to another hit film tutorial it's been a long time it's been a couple of months and I apologize for the lack of videos but I've been really busy recently in that time we've actually passed 50,000 subscribers so I do want to say thank you to everyone who's subscribed rather than doing a huge 50k special or anything like that I thought I'd just get straight back into it for everyone and today we're going to be in hitfilm doing a green-screen tutorial let's go ahead and start off by creating a composite shot just gonna right click make composite shots you can do is from a clip in an editor as well and just hit OK this will just make it much easier for us to do the green screening I think a very first step whenever you've got this green screen footage is to mask out the bits that you don't want most of the time you'll have the edges of the green-screen and frame or in this case we have this object here which we don't want in the frame so to get rid of it you can use a mask which is the shape telling the layer where it should and shouldn't be visible we can use their art angular and ellipse or a free-form mask which we're going to do right now so just select your layer I'm going to use a scroll wheel to zoom out a little bit and just right click and drag to drag around I'm going to select the freeform mask tool and just click and drag if you want to have a curve point or just click to create points like so and I'm just going to create a mask like this making sure that everything except that object is visible in the frame now we're going to go back to our transform tool and we're just going to go here and scale to fit okay so let's go ahead and now do the green screening talking about green screening there's three real steps to the process the first is keying getting rid of the green the second is enhancement making sure that our key looks good and the third is to correct to make sure that our foreground looks like the background we're going to go through each of these steps today and each of them are equally important so don't just do the key make sure you also do the enhancement and of course the correction to make sure you get a good looking key so let's go ahead and start off with the King there are three main effects to use to key out your green in hitfilm the first is chroma key the chroma key effect however is only available in the pro version or with an add-on so we're going to go and focus on the Express this is a really good tool but it is an express tutorial and there are really good ways you can key in Express namely the color difference key and the hue and RGB key which are good for different purposes let's start off with the color difference key it's a super easy key to use and you just click and drag and most of the time it should be done immediately but our key is pretty bad here I'm sure that's pretty bad footage so we're going to have to tweak with things a little bit more today once you've applied the effect to go into your controls and open it up you'll see the screen color in our case it's green but you can also choose red and blue and you can also set a minimum and maximum value why have these two values basically if you have any gap between these values then it has this kind of soft area or this tolerance where some of it is going to be keyed out and some of it isn't we can see if we drag the minimum value all the way up to one more and more of the stuff gets cade out and by the end we're even cutting into some of the green areas of reflections or transparency of this jump-off so we're going to drag it back down again and you can see if we go to a point like this and we drag this back for example and we make the difference between these really small you can see what I mean by the tolerance area if we're cutting off here and having no tolerance in between then we get these really janky looking things where this is inside the came out and this isn't and it doesn't look very good the gamma basically adjusts both of these values at the same time so if you just want to have a quick way to adjust both of them without adjusting the the softness inside them you can use the gamma as well and another really important one is view mat if we go back out and I should say that you might have an options here you might have checkerboard background checked or unchecked it doesn't really matter which one but I'm going to leave it checked on for now so we can see what's transparent and what's black but let's go ahead into view matte view match shows us an image where it's black and white everything that's white is visible and everything that's black has been completely cut out by the key so what we're going to do is we're going to quickly drag the max here and when we want to start green screening this the first priority is to make sure that all of the green of our background is keyed out so we just want to go and drag up the minimum until we can see that this area here we all needed to be completely black otherwise we're going to have stuff left in there but you can see in dragging it all the way up to 0.98 we're actually cutting into our area here and even if we try and drag this back all the way to 0.98 itself the maximum value we still have some holes in here and it doesn't look very good so this is work for you great but I'm also going to show you now why you might want to use the hue and RGB key let's go ahead and delete this and let's go and search for that human RGB key dragging it on we can say that by default we have a different kind of color selector if we uncheck the qiraji Bakey go to this eyedropper and just click and drag we can actually select a specific color of our green screen let's just select this value in the middle here because you can see that we have this dark stuff here and this bright stuff in the right and that's why it's having a bit of trouble so let's select a bit in the middle and turn it on tolerance in this case is going to be the amount of colors close to the colors we've selected here that is going to K out so the more tolerance we have them what's going to came out the less tolerance we have the less is going to K out and we have a similar view mat here so let's try a similar thing what we did with a color difference key if we try and make the background completely black you can see we're start to cut in heavily into this here so what we can do is actually change the match colors by to RGB this will change it from just the hue value basically whether it's red green blue yellow orange to all the different color channels which will take into account not just different values of color but also the brightness when they're all combined together you'll also notice a couple of different things happening with the kind of splotchy areas if we go back to our hue here you can see that us blotchy areas are quite blocky in nature and you can see there's really weird pixely kind of shapes that's because we're only taking into account the hue data here and because of the compression of our video it stores less data for just the hue if we switch to RGB you can still see that we have some of this blocky compression but in general it's much finer and we have much more detail so that's another reason why you might want to use RGB let's go back to scale to fit now and let's increase the tolerance until we start cutting in to how jumper here might think that this has done an even worse job than last time because we still have tons of green on the sides in but what we can do is we can now combine these keys let's go ahead and uncheck this K to make sure it's not visible let's go ahead and duplicate it with control D on a PC or command D on a Mac on the second one let's open it up or actually before we open it up and check it we're just going to drop I drop a brighter color of the area over here now let me highlight it we can see it keys at all that brighter stuff and this keys at all the darker stuff and combined we have a really smooth edge but we also have all of this stuff keyed out over here we can view the final amount here using this here you can see that it's looking really nice and clean I'm just going to duplicate it one more time like so let's uncheck these guys and let's go ahead and now select the darker areas over here if we highlight it we can see that they're keyed out let's view the map to make sure it's all nice I'm just going to decrease the tolerance a little bit like so and now we're going to highlight these as well you can see we've got a pretty nice key okay so now that we've got those keys selected you can see there's still a little bit of some splotchy areas here and it's not a hundred percent perfect so this is where mattock enhancement comes in the first thing we can do is use a mat cleaner effect let's close up all of our keying effects and drag on the mat cleaner the map cleaner will help us to smooth further and choke our mat let's go ahead and uncheck a view mat of this effect is we get the key and now let's check view mat here so we can view all the changes we've made with the mat cleaner effect the first thing we're going to look at is smooth and that's going to actually be really helpful for our key here smooth will basically smooth out the shape of our outline so if we just increase it you can see that without really changing the shape too much it actually just gets rid of those little bits and it makes it a lot smoother well notice if we push it too much then some of the corners start to get warping stuff and if thin areas start to disappear so it's very useful in some circumstances in other not so much we're going to drag it down to zero and you can see actually it's got rid of some of these areas here that's because it's smoothed out the shape here and basically it's just gotten rid of them and we can use this as a really helpful tool to just get rid of these areas here without changing the shape of our map that much so I'm just gonna set it to 13 and you can see we've gotten rid of all those areas here but we've still got a really nice key on the outside I'm now going to show you the other two options we're going to start off with choke choke basically takes in the edge and makes your selection smaller as you can see with these holes here it's really good for showing where you might have holes in your video because it basically just expands the holes that's another way to think about it feathering will basically blur the edges of the video so we get a softer edge not just a smoother shape we actually get a smoother gradation from visible to not visible if we wanted to further this clip what we could do is we could actually just go ahead and duplicate the mat cleaner effect get rid of the review mat here get rid of the smooth here and feather this and that way it wouldn't take into account those holes that we had before the final enhancement effect we're going to look at today is the spill removal if we just drag spill removal on you can see it kind of gets rid of some of these colors these colors are these green colors that are caused by often reflections from the green-screen onto the subject in this case our jump is actually a little bit transparent and so they're showing through usually this is a dead giveaway that your green screening so spill removal helps to remove those green reflections if it's too much removal for you you can go down to standard or you can just remove the strength okay so that's all of enhancement and keying done I'm also going to briefly touch on correction today correction is best the process of making sure that your foreground looks like your background let's go ahead and drag on this background to you as you can see if we just play back the video it is kind of just not fitting and part of it is because of this terrible light that I've got on the jumper at the moment but another half is that the colors just don't seem to match you can use the Scopes or the grading transfer tool which is a pro only or an add-on feature but today we're going to be using the curves to try and correct these we can see basically that there's this really strong blue sky as blue car even on the pavement here which you know pavement is normally naturally blue but because of these reflections our background has this kind of blue cast so we can try to imitate that on our foreground let's go ahead and drag the curves effect onto our foreground the green screen clip drag it on after all your King and let's go ahead and before we do the the blue actually we should try and do the luminance luminance is basically the brightness and so the curves effect it might be a little bit intimidating but I'm going to give you a very quick rundown you can think of the bottom axis the x-axis as your input your original image and your y-axis as the output the image that you're going to get as a refining result of using the curves effect let's say for example that we drag the curve up like this as you can see it's made everything brighter in our image let's take a breakdown of why this is this is our input range from pure black to pure white you can see that we have a mid gray value here if we just follow this mid gray value here over to where it's gone on the y-axis you can see there's now become a 75% white value meaning it's become much brighter also notice that the blacks here are still very black the shadows and that's because these black values are still just black and these white values are still just white so if you can see this preset here this is an s-curve basically this creates contrast by making sure the bright areas are brighter and making sure the dark areas are darker we can also show this by for example dragging this up this will make sure that the pure blacks are mid gray now so that's basically a rundown of how the curves effect works let's go and reset the curve here and the luminance is actually pretty spot-on I'm just going to grab an s-curve here and I'm just going to drag the highlights up a little bit maybe or I'm going to because the whole image is pretty dark you got to make sure maybe a bit of it it's more brighter like so and that's how luminance correction done and now it's time for our color correction as you can see we've been editing the channel RGB which is all of our channels and when we edit all of our color channels together there's no color change but if we say go to blue and we increase the amount of blue you can see well it becomes much more Lu so let's increase the value of blue a little bit but another way we can increase the value of blue is to get rid of the other colors so if we get rid of red by dragging it down and you can see it has this kind of weird green cast on it now looks a bit too cyan so if we get rid of a bit of green now as well you have we can have this really natural looking blue that's added by adding blue and removing these two colors as well another couple of tips while your green screening you might want to add a lens blur effect onto your background that'll make it look like you've your camera has a shallow depth of field and it makes it a little bit more realistic although the lens blur effect does takes quite some time to render out so if you're in a rush you can just use the standard blur effect over here I would also recommend using motion blur on your clip here when you're shooting a green screen clip it's recommended to use a higher shutter speed meaning that there's not much motion blur that way you get a very clear outline but because you can't really factor in motion blur into your King you can add it digitally or fake it afterwards and luckily here foam has a really good motion blur effect if you just apply this to your foreground clip after all of your keying effects then it'll add a fake motion blur and it'll try to recreate the motion blur from your video although this as well as the lens blur will take even longer to render so use this wisely and it can stuff up on some cliffs if you have ton of moon as well all right so that's basically how to green-screen in hitfilm thanks for watching this video if you really enjoyed this video then make sure to hit the like button to let others know that you liked it and to help other people find it you can also subscribe to my channel I make tons of other hitfilm tutorials and other editing and visual effects tutorials like this as either way I will see you in the next video stay shiny bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Shiny Films

Views: 29,283

Keywords: hitfilm express, hitfilm express tutorial, hitfilm 4 express, green screen, hitfilm tutorial, hitfilm, how to, tutorial, green screen tutorial, green screen effect tutorial in hitfilm, green screen effect basic tutorial in hitfilm, green screen hitfilm tutorial, how to get rid of the green screen on hitfilm, how to use a greenscreen in hitfilm express, green screen hitfilm express

Id: WkATEsPGIMo

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019