Multi-layer Keying in After Effects Part 1 - Pulling a Basic Key

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to this tutorial on pulling a multi-layer key in After Effects I ought to start off by saying that I'm not a keying expert I do the occasional bit of keying work but every now and then you find that when you've got a key and you need to do a problem you've got light spilling you need to do one area that it can seriously or adversely affect another area and I want to show you the approach that I take to be able to do multi layer keying so that each area looks good for an excellent end result now what I plan to do is split this into four tutorials the first one we'll look at pulling a key with key light one point to the second tutorial we'll look at doing multi layers so that we can deal with different light spill issues on different parts of our image that we are keying the third one we'll look at line issues where you have black lines or difficult areas around your key and how we can actually key those areas separately so that we can deal with specific issues around the edge of our key and the final tutorial is going to look at the issue of feathering our masks the fact that we do have a tool that ships with After Effects called mocha for After Effects which has a tool for being able to create variable width feathers on our masks and I'm going to look at mocha for AE to be able to create these variable width feathers so those are the four tutorials that we're planning and this is the footage that we're going to use it's from the website Hollywood camerawork us and under the green plates are HTML they provide a whole series of free green-screen plates for you to play with now this is a fantastic resource for anybody who wants to learn how to do green screening and my thanks to Hollywood camerawork us for what they provide if you get a chance go to their site and have a look at the materials that they provide because they also provide some superb training material for directors and visual effects supervisors and things like that but I'm on the download side looking at the the green screens and I want you to just point out it says really important here you may use these clips any way you want and post the results anywhere but let us know if you do something called you may use these clips to make instructional videos which I'm using now or teach a class as long as you mention us which I hope we've done etc etc and so I've come to this page and I've downloaded one in particular that I'm gonna be using as you can see there are a whole bunch of them with markers all kinds of different issues to deal with they're fantastic footage we're going to be working particularly on Go diva clothes so if you want to download this one so that we can have a little play and you can work along with me feel free to go along and download it I've also got to go diva medium downloaded but I'm just gonna use that to show you one particular thing so Go diva clothes is the one that I'm going to be working on particularly for this particular tutorial and again my thanks to Hollywood camerawork us for a superb site and for this brilliant resource for us to train with ok so how do I bring that in so I'm going to double click in my project panel anywhere where it's empty and I'm going to go to my desktop so if I bring Go diva wide you can open up the folder click on the first image and then make sure at the bottom down here it says that it's coming in as footage and mine's actually a pink sequence so you need to have this as footage and then you click open and after effects imports that as a single footage item and I'm going to bring in Go diva close as well so that I've got both of them in here Go diva close this is the one we'll be doing most of the work in again make sure it's footage it's a pink sequence click open and then we've got the items now the reason that I've chosen Go diva wide as well is because I want to demonstrate one particular issue that often happens when it comes to keying which doesn't actually occur in our Go diva clothes so if I take Go diva wide and I drag that down to the new composition icon let go you'll see that we've got the green plate the whole thing but also you'll see that we've got items that we don't want to show we've got a fan we've got bits and pieces of stage behind us really all we want is the green screen part of this lady we don't want to have all these other bits and pieces showing around now this is often the case with green screening in that you want to get rid of everything else but also when you pull green screen with key light 1.2 which is what we're going to be using it's very important that you minimize the amount of work that keylight has to do now notice for instance we've got variations in color on our green background you want to keep those too minimum the best possible background is a completely evenly lit background and evenly lit background is going to be better than one that's got these fairly large differences in color because the tolerance of color that it needs to deal with as you can see is quite high and also we don't really want key light to be having to key right out to the edges where nothing is happening it's a processor-intensive piece of work anyway keying so what we want to do is draw a mask around the lady a garbage matte in fact that excludes everything else and then feather the edges because when it comes to King one of the really important points are keep your edges soft if you have hard edges even if you've done an excellent key they will show up so when it comes to doing green screen even if the whole of your background is green and well lit still draw a mask around the one that you want to green-screen animate it if you need to over the length of the shot to make sure that you get everything in it and then key light has far less work to do than having to say take out the green over here which you're never going to bother with anyway so very quickly let's just draw a mask I'm gonna zoom out slightly take my pen tool and I'm gonna start off-screen in fact click and drag click and drag and it's got to be a loose garbage matte you don't go really close for no other reason and the fact that you're going to be feathering but you've got a bit of an issue here in that the distance between her shawl and the fan is quite close of course I ought to say that the first thing you should always do is actually scrub through your footage I've actually scrubbed through it so I know what it looks like so you always ought to have a look at your footage and make sure that it all fits within your mask or that it's easy to key and you know what's going to be where and then when I pull my current time indicator through I can see that well that pretty much all fits in and what I need to do now is make sure that I feather the mask now the quick way of doing that is select your layer and hit f4 feather if you can't do that the alternative is to just scroll open your layer select your mask open your mask and go down to the feather properties and give it a bit of a soft edge but this is where you have to be careful because as you can see I'm beginning to come in close here and I'm close here is it going to be okay am I too close do I need to come out a bit if you think you need to come out a bit take your arrow tool your selection tool and just drag the edges out a little so that you make sure that your not either bringing something in or cutting something out unnecessarily and then just scrub through make sure that have you have a look do you need to any point animate your mask if you need to animate your mask then all you need to do is click the stopwatch next to mask path and move the points as you move through now one other thing if you can move all the points in one go double click any one of the points and then move the mask as a whole but if you do need to move individual points you click away deselect your mask re select your mask and then you can window select any individual point and move that as you need to but if possible try and move multiple points together so if I was going to move that one maybe I'll try and move all the ones on one side to get a better end result so have a play make sure that you do all the masks create your garbage map this is your garbage matte once that's created with no effect applied that would then be the item that you will work on so once that's created you can rename that particular composition so I would rename up here as my G wide garbage mask garbage matte sorry and that would be the item that I will work at and I will pull that down to a new composition and then in it comes ready for key light to be applied so that's what you would do with a wide mask like this but actually the item that we're going to be working on is the Go diva cloak so I'm just going to delete these ones that I've worked on and delete that delete that and I'm actually going to delete white as well because we're not going to use that again and I never use this Go diva close and I'm going to pull that down to the new comp icon and as you can see if I pull the current time indicator through there is no room for doing a garbage mask pretty much the whole of the screen is going to be used all the way through possibly you could mask off a little bit over here if you felt it was worth it but because the screen is so full of this young lady it's not really worth doing the actual effort of putting a garbage mask and we're going to use the original each time so I'm just going to rename the original and select up here in the project panel hit return and call it G diva start hit return and that's what I'm going to be using in my composition now this is the competition that I've dragged and started from it so I'm actually gonna use this competition and bring down multiple copies of G divas start eventually so I'm gonna rename this one I'm going to select it and hit return and call it my layered comp in the hit return and this is where eventually I'll be bringing down multiple copies of G diva start and rename it each time now this layer in here needs renaming because I know I'm going to have to do multiple layers I'm going to name each layer down here in the timeline to represent what I am doing and I can see that she's got green spill on this arm and under her arm and on her skin and the back of the hand here but I can also see that she's got a different green spill on her dress and she's got a different green spill in her hair so I'm going to need at least three keys so each layer needs to be renamed accordingly so I select my layer hit return and I'm going to call this one skin because I'm going to start off to demonstrate the skin so this is how we apply and use key light 1.2 first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to maximize my screen so it fits in and I'm going to go to effect and then you'll go down to keying and key light 1.2 and select that and it's applied to the layer and it's made by the foundry and the foundry make some apps that you're fantastic plug-ins for After Effects they also are the manufacturers or the makers of nuke which is another compositing program extremely powerful feel free to visit their website and have a look at some of the other fantastic tools that they do like the camera tracker that they do and tools to deal with rolling shutter fantastic not cheap but fantastic now first thing notice that we have a view here and the view has got lots of different options the main ones that we're going to be looking at is the final result which is what you're seeing at the moment and we're probably going to be looking at the combined matte those are going to be the two that we're going to look at most of all but notice that that's where they are and so when I talk about different views I'm talking about the views that in here it's a final result and combined that and then we have unpromoted flight results now what that is saying is do not mix the background color in with the edges of the item now this is very important you want this checked you might well be pre-multiplying further on down the production line when you bring this into your composition and you want the the keyed item in which case it would be this lady - it sort of merging better with her background you may pre multiply the background into the edges at that point but at this point we do not want to pre multiply in other words blend the background color into the edges of our item if we do so we're actually going to be bringing in a green haze around the edge of the lady which is exactly what we don't want so you want to leave unpromoted plied results on because you don't want the background to mix in with the edge of your keyed item and then the screen color is really one of the most important ones this is saying okay what color do you want to get rid of now clearly we want to get rid of the green in this lady and the best way of doing is to get as close as you can to the lady or as close as you can to the item that you want to key out while still being clearly in the background color so if I take the picker here and I go as close to her skin as I can say about there go close to her hair say just up there and click and you can instantly see the transparency grid behind now I've chosen this particular shot so I'm just going to go back to fit I've chosen this particular shot because actually it's an extremely difficult one because she's got this I don't audit his chiffon welts see-through semi-transparent background that we still want to be able to see now you think that that's a good result but if I now go to combined matte and have a little look you'll see that if the background is not a hundred percent black now when it's black it's a hundred percent transparent but you can see maybe it's pretty black over here but it's pretty gray here and certainly very special great here and then when you look at the lady herself you can see that there are gray parts in her now where it is great it is trans parent obviously this needs to be transparent but we don't want her transparent here or transparent in her head we want the whites to be white in other words you cannot see through them and you want the blacks to be black so that you definitely can see through them now you always need to be careful when you're playing with getting this balance right between the blacks and the whites if you overdo it you'll lose this detail in her hair so you see that you've got these greyish areas here which are semi-transparent showing that her hair or the edges of her hair which is actually what you want but if you overdo what I'm gonna do next making sure the blacks are blacks and the whites of whites what you can end up with is a very very smooth look around these detailed edges and when you end up with that you end up with something that looks obviously keyed and really lets you down and everybody can see it in fact I saw an advert in the UK very recently where a lady was in a a showroom for beds and you could just take one look at her hair and see how how smooth it was and you knew immediately she was very badly keyed okay so how do I make sure the blacks are fully black and the whites are fully white so we can avoid these holes that are in her at the moment these bits that shouldn't be there that are there well it's all found under the screen mat down here if you open up the screen mat you'll see that you've got clip black and clip white and it's these that we're going to be playing with to make sure the blacks are black and the whites are white but you can overdo it so be careful so I'm just going to pull the blacks up and this this area particularly over here I really want to make sure it's fully black so I just just pull it up a bit you can see very quickly it's disappearing I'm at 11 now 12 and that's definitely completely black I pull it back a bit you can see that some of the hairs coming back in here and as I pull it forward you can see that as the blacks get blacker that hair pretty much starts to disappear and this is where you're beginning to get the smoothing it's not too bad I'm at nine and now I want to clip the whites and other words want to pull it down from 100 to try and pop out these areas that are semi-transparent inside of her particular the back of the hand here you'll see and just in the middle of her head and at the side so if I start to pull these down you'll see that for too long all those bits that were we black start to pop out and I'm at about 84 and that looks pretty good to me there are perhaps a tiny bit on the back of the hand problem is I don't want to overdo it because I'm gonna end up with the smoothing it's always sort of push pull push one side and pull the other see if I go too far I carry on going with all the whites then all this chiffon becomes pretty much completely and utterly opaque and you can't see through it and obvious you want to maintain some of that so I reckon looking at about eighty four maybe slightly less will try eighty four anyway and let's have a little look at the final output and go to the final output and that's not bad actually that's that's quite a good result however to have a really good feel for whether it's got holding or not you need to stick something underneath that's fairly high contrast that would show through if there was a problem now I've got a picture I've been using which is fairly high contrast I'll just grab that and bring that in underneath see if I can find it and drag that and drop that underneath and let's have a look well as it's shown through her arms her hands have bits and pieces no you know that's looking okay to me it's not too bad we've got a fairly good key in the sense of the blacks are black the whites are white we can clearly see through the background we've still see through the chiffon scarf but you know we've got real problems as you can probably see with spill so I've still got green spill on her arm and her underarm green spill on her dress green spill in a hair or face here and under the arm here and we haven't got many problems with lines which is very nice sometimes when you do a key you can end up with some pretty awful problems when you get to the edge of things with the lines a little bit of a line here but it's not too bad and there is something that we can do about that when we get to the next stage okay so we've pulled a key and as you can see the picture I've brought in is quite large if I want to I can or physically drag it in a bit I have a better look and go fit again so what we need to do next is we need to start to get rid of this spill and the reason that we're going to need multiple layers is simply because when I compensate for the spill on her arm it's not going to work for the spill on her dress which isn't again going to work for the spill in her hair so we need multiple layers to be able to deal with all these different spill issues and if say we felt that this line on this arm here was a bit of an issue and we wanted to deal with this line we'd also need a separate key for that area and I'm going to show you how to make separate keys and move on in the next tutorial [Music]

Channel: Creative COW

Views: 178,130

Keywords: adobe, after, effects, tutorials, how, video, tutorial

Id: U0x-G8oSue4

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 10 2012