How to use the ATEM Mini Upstream & Downstream Keys

hey there how's it going my name's tim and on this channel we look at a whole pile of geeky stuff to do with film video and youtube content creation today we're going to be looking at upstream and downstream keying i'm going to explain exactly what these are and i'm going to show you how to use upstream or downstream keys with a blackmagic atm to make your videos a heap better first thing i'm going to do is define what the upstream and downstream keys are and what keying is in general and then we're going to go and have a look at some specific uses for them okay let's get into it why does everybody say that first thing i want to answer is what is an upstream key well basically that's green screening for the general terms you can imagine having a picture like this one here where you've got a subject sitting in front of a green screen not doing much at all because well it's an inanimate dole thing and the green behind that can be turned into clear pixels and then you can show something behind it like this alien landscape i'm gonna get into that one and actually doing an upstream key of that later on the video a downstream key on the other hand is something like a lower thirds or a bug or a title that you might want to put over your video that has a built-in transparency like a an alpha channel or a luma key so black or white pixels that you're going to turn into transparency not quite as technical as a green screen and doesn't typically involve motion graphics or something we're going to have a look at both of these and see how they work and how you can use them to make your videos better and more dynamic if you've got a black magic a team also a good reason to go buy a black magic atm before i get too far into that though i just want to remind you that if you've got any questions or anything that you want to ask about all of this do put them in the comments below i do try and read them all and i will get back to as many of them as i can first of all let's look and see what a downstream key is now one of the most popular downstream keys you're going to see will be the lower third and i'm just pull one of those up here now for you so you can see what that is and there's a downstream key i could also use a title which looks like this or a bug which looks like this that's that little thing up in the corner now those are very simple static graphics and in each case those have a transparent background that i'm going to use and that means that i can use a downstream key which you can find under pellets in the atm software control for the blackmagic atm i've got the downstream kia's controls here i'll just expand that out and you can see here i've got two downstream keys key one and key two now those are also featured over here on the main control thingy the main defining difference between an upstream and a downstream key is that an upstream key apart from having a lot more features available to it and you'll see that later an upstream key is typically defined as being part of a transition where a downstream key is something that is more persistent and might stay across an entire video for example that bug i was showing you before if i come back to the atm software control here and i have a look under media i can drag this ladybug onto media player one it was already there but and now i've got this little thing in the corner the reason i've put a ladybug up here is that this kind of logo or image that's put into the corner subtly is called a bug and it's usually something that stays there present across the entire show you'll see that tv stations quite often use it as a marketing thing and they leave it there so back in the switcher under the pellets under the downstream key controls i've got here i've got that fill source set up as media player one the fill source for a care by the way is the image that goes on the top layer if you can imagine video is a whole pile of video sources as transparent layers above each other so i've defined this as key player one i've also told the key source to be media key player one and that's because i've saved that ladybug as a png image that has an alpha channel i.e the transparency is built into the image which means that i can just turn on that key and this little bug appears up in the corner here's it so that's why it's called a bug is it's the kind of thing that's a logo you can put over other things we could put up there and i'll just quickly drag a couple of those across again are there lower thirds which is going to look like that the video title which is going to look a bit like that and of course some slightly more subtle things that you might want to do if it's a youtube video and you're looking for more subscribers and people to click like and do all that kind of thing which incidentally you can do if you can find a space somewhere down here to do that you can go and click those buttons that would be awesome and that's basically what a downstream key is for you can put graphic elements above the main video that you want to be persistent across a number of cuts and scenes that kind of thing on the blackmagic atm of course you can tie a downstream key to a transition i'll just show you how to do that what i can do here for example is hit tie and then if i use the atem and go back to the first picture you'll see that that then ties what i last put into the media player into here if i switch back again it's gone again so it ties it into that transition then if i go to another shot it will tie that back in every time i go through a transition it will toggle that on and off and tie it to the tight to the transition for example if i put the lower thirds here back into the first media player then come back to the switcher i can tie that downstream key which i've got the fill source for as the first media player onto the next transition then i can transition back to camera one and here you go it brings that downstream key that you can see right here with it not all video switches will be able to tie a downstream key to a transition that's something that's specific to the blackmagic switches the blackmagic atems so although a lot of the stuff is standard across the industry there are some special features implemented on different devices you can also choose to just turn the downstream key directly on from here and that just goes on and off as you can see or you can use the auto and that fades it in and out as well so you can do that and of course set the auto duration here so i could set that to like 10 frames instead of one second and then that would fade in and out a bit quicker so that really is the essence of a downstream key it's being able to put a fairly static image on top of a piece of video and just have that display with a transparent layer quite often you'll build it in photoshop and then you'll save it as a png with the transparent background and that alpha channel comes through you can drop the pngs directly into the media player on the atm software control and that transparency comes through and works just like you've seen it working right here in fact now we're going to have a quick look at the upstream keys i'm just going to look at the first upstream key we only really need to look at one though it is good to know that you can layer a whole pile of these up so there are four upstream keys available for example on the a10 mini extreme where there's only one available on the previous atms okay we've got four different ways of pulling a key in here there's luma key chroma key pattern cree and digital video effects for the purposes of this i'm just going to use the chroma key on this video and what i'm going to do is i have um this neat background here which is an alien planet that i found on google i stole it basically and i've got this thing here on another camera which has got a good green background so back on the atm software control i'm just going to use upstream key one as i said before and i'm going to pull a chroma key that means that you're keying to a particular color in this case the green screen background and the fill source then that's the piece of video that has the green screen on it is on camera three we already had a look at that one i'll just click on that again so you can see it if i click here i can see the chroma sample and where it's being taken from on the screen now if we skip back to that image here i can see that that top right hand corner is all green screen till about a third of the way in i can choose that area there you can move this box around and you can see the color sampled color that it's got in the swatch above that's this thing up here and if i come over here i'm obviously over part of the image that's i don't want to be made transparent i want to make this bit here transparent this slider on the side is used to enlarge or decrease that sample box in this particular case the image that i'm using here isn't moving around at all it's just staying fairly static so i can safely know that that area is going to remain the transparency area the key adjustments down here now if you're not pulling a very good key so it's got blotchy bits or something you can come down here and adjust it most of the time the automatic settings are going to be absolutely spot on especially if your key is properly lit so you can just leave that as it is and not have to worry about any of that now i know in this case that it's going to work quite nicely for me and i know that i've got my alien background on media player 2 so i'm going to click that down here and i know that my key is upstream key one so i'm going to choose that and you'll notice that this section here is called next transition so i've got media player 2 and key one so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to hit auto to do a one second crossfade actually i'll do that without the key first so if i do that crossfade you see that it's going to go to my alien background and there we go again and now if i turn key one on on the next transition you'll see that when i cut across and do an auto there we go there's my guy sitting in front of the alien background on the atm control i'm going to turn that key off here now and on air off here on air that's just using this button here you see i do the same thing and the key comes up over this but as you can see it's very very easy to use that green screening effect what this won't do is properly light your green screen for you and everything like that if you've got shadows on your green screen or hot spots in the light it's not going to key quite so well in fact what i'll do right now is i'll just pop around to my green screen and i'll shine some light and cast some shadows so you can see what sort of effect that has as you can see this bright light as i'm shining across it with a torch really creates what we call a hot spot and it's not in the right color range so it's not going to key properly and same when i'm throwing my hand around creating shadows that doesn't work well and if i just come back to the nice clean key then as you can see here it's all good and the image in the background looks absolutely fantastic there are some other things you can do here with the kia as well i'll just show you a couple of those real quickly so here i've got the same soft toy chroma keyed over the atm controls and i can just scroll down the controls here and you can see that i've got a few color adjustment things here that i can i can work with and you can use these here to blend the character into the background because you know it's not always that we've got that nice clean background like this and and maybe the colors don't quite match or something and i can use these controls here to adjust the color of the pixels that aren't chroma keyed out so as you can see that background is quite green so what i'll do is i'll i'll just increase the the green of the character a bit more to match the light tone of what's happening there and there's not much blue in that so i'm going to just reduce the blue a little bit as well that way now the character that i've got sitting in front matches into the background and into the lighting uh quite a bit better i could possibly increase the contrast a little bit as well to match the um the lighting tone the lights not necessarily coming from the same direction here but i could also increase the brightness or decrease the brightness if i wanted to sort of blend better into the background that i've got here as well one more thing i wanted to show you by the way is that you can actually use these things in conjunction you don't have to be using one or the other once again i've got my toy here over the alien background but i can also turn on my lower thirds there so you can have more than one of these things happening at the same time in fact i could put some more dynamic layers like some smoke effects or cloud effects in between them and another upstream key so that the background would look more dynamic and even put another one in front of the character to make it look more integrated that would be quite cool you can layer up several of these things on some of the keys depending on the video switch you've got and how many keys it implements anyway i hope this has been useful to you if it has don't forget to click subscribe right down here and of course watch these two videos as well do leave comments below and i'll see you in another video later it's been great have a good one

Channel: Tim Simpson

Views: 8,553

Keywords: ATEM Mini Upstream & Downstream Keys, Blackmagic ATEM Mini, ATEM Mini Upstream and Downstream Keys, blackmagic Design ATEM Mini, blackmagic atem mini extreme, blackmagic atem mini extreme iso, blackmagic atem mini pro iso, blackmagic atem mini vs pro, blackmagic atem mini pro setup, How to add graphics and titles with the Blackmagic ATEM Mini, atem mini upstream key, atem mini downstream key, atem mini upstream downstream key, atem mini downstream keyer, atem mini upstream keyer

Id: 9mrlImhIdTI

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021