Premiere Pro Green Screen Editing Secrets

with a few secret editing tricks that people won't tell you you can get this pretty professional result out of this rather bad green screen using only Ultra key the built-in key of Adobe Premiere Pro and the best thing is once you understand the method it will be super fast and reliable before we start a quick note I try not to be boring so I talk pretty quick if I'm too quick you can easily Slow Me Down by clicking on the wheel in the bottom right if you're on a computer or probably in the top right if you are on mobile then click on playback speed and then choose your preferred speed too much talk let's get started I will open the FX panel search for key and apply Ultra Key by double clicking it or dragging it onto my clip then I need to tell the keyer which color it needs to key out I could of course try to key the orange color of my shirt but that wouldn't help us with it so I will pick a green color instead I usually pick the color close to the most delicate structures of my clip usually the hair that will key out the green and create a black background so the next thing we need to do is to bring in a different background to be able to better judge the keying result that could of course be the final background you want to use but do better see the keying arrows I usually use a uniform brighter cyan color or light blue as a background you can get that by going to the project panel clicking on the new symbol and choose color Matty click OK for the size and then choose a color zero zero AAA works fine if you want to type in the color I drag that below the video in my timeline and I see the keying arrows much better than before and next I resize the clip to 90 by going to the FX panel and choose 90 for scale reason being is that this clip looks good the way it is but if I resize it you see that it actually has some vignetting that I also want to remove so far so good if you followed all the advice that I gave you so far in this green screen tutorial series your results would look like this but if you didn't follow my device you might get this instead which would require a few more steps I will use this bad example here to work on though because if you can Master the worst green screen you can also easily Master anything else usually what people on YouTube tell you is move some of the sliders until you get rid of all the unevenness in the background what that will give you is very bad hair particularly the dark hair and quite some other problems too that look very amateurish what if I told you that with a bit of understanding you could have this result instead with much more detail in the hair and a better result altogether and it doesn't even take more time to get there you just need to understand keying before I change anything in the ultra key settings I want you to remove the worst parts of the clip which is usually the corners and in this case also the tripod and the background you can do that by masking out these parts so I go to opacity click the pen tool and draw a mask over my clip to finish the mask you need to click on the first point you have set and all of a sudden all the garbage is gone that's also like this mask is called garbage mask but even if you don't have any garbage in your frame what you can do even with very well-it footage is applying a mask to remove the slight vignettes in the corners if you can cut it away why key more aggressively and eat away fine details in the hair that way edges are usually not something I'd move into while doing videos so they can pretty safely be cut off but I'll later show you an even better trick let's now try to understand the settings within the ultra key to improve our results some people will tell you that while keying changed the output here to Alpha Channel but I won't even explain what it does because as you will see there is a better way of doing things the next setting out of three presets of how aggressive you want to key don't touch that because you want control over the key rather than just tell the software to key more aggressively then we have the key color we already use that to pick the base color that we want to key out and now it gets interesting all you really need to get a quick and perfect key in almost every situation is the five sliders that appear when you open the multi-generation section in fact you don't even need them all the first one is transparency you'll hardly ever need that unless you have someone with very bright hair on a very dark green background what it basically does is reduce the opacity of your final result as I said helps with blonde hair and dark background so let's set that back to the default value by hitting this restore button the next slider is highlight to better understand what it does let me pick a darker color in the Corners instead what you now see is that all the green tones that are brighter than the one we picked are not well keyed out brighter means that they are the green highlights in our key and that's where the slider takes its name from highlight if I lower that value it means that the opacity of the highlights will be reduced by the way if you click the arrow here you can much finer adjust the settings that's why I'm always talking about sliders but like we would save that highlight slider again on to the next slider the shadow I think you can already guess what the shadow slider does when the Highlight slider reduces the opacity of the green tones that are brighter than the pick bass tone correct it will reduce the opacity of the green tones that are darker than the picked bass tone let me just revert our bass tone by clicking on the area near the hair again now when I load the shadow slider the darker areas of our green screen will disappear but with it also the darker parts of the hair and if we zoom in it even eats holes into the darker parts of my shirt so the shadow slider reduces the opacity darker areas let's restore the Shadows again and zoom out the next slider is tolerance and it is supposed to increase or decrease the range of colors around the pick base color that has never done much for me no matter if I go all the way up or all the way down and finally there is the pedestal slider most people almost exclusively use that one because it miraculously seems to get rid of most of the arrows which seems like a pretty good idea but we don't do that because it comes at a price it eats away the fine details of the hair again so when each of the slider helps key out the background but always comes with a downside how are we supposed to get a good result and here comes my secret with Selective keying I'll just show you how easy it is and how well it works let me reset the ultra key tool by clicking the reset button here I'll first concentrate on the hair because they are most tricky I start by picking the green base color around the hair right under the effects name you will see the same symbol that we use to create our garbage mask but the garbage mask under the opacity section masks the complete clip what we now do is mask the effect sounds complicated but why not just use it to see what it does this time I will not use the pen tool but click on the ellipse instead and what we see is that our Ultra key effect is suddenly only applied to the area within the mask by clicking and dragging inside the ellipse I can move the mask to place it over the head then if I click and drag this rectangle on the handle here I can increase and decrease the size of the ellipse and if I click and drag the circle up here I can change the feather of the Mask make sure that the inner dashed line includes all the hair so far so good the hair looks pretty good despite the bad uneven background what about the wrist to keep everything organized let me first change back to the effect controls and right click on the effect name here choose rename and call it head we do that to not get confused because next I will apply a second Ultra key effect by double clicking on the effect in the FX panel that will place a second instance of the filter onto the clip do not get confused we again rename the effect to body because this time we concentrate on the body so I will logically pick the base color near the most delicate parts of the body except for my head I'm pretty hairy so I'll click on the area near my arms to key out the background that will key out the complete background but logically the result is pretty messy because of all the wrinkles the good thing is I can now raise the pedestal without affecting the hair that region is out of bounds because it has already been dealt with in the first instance of the ultra key effect cool right so we already have a pretty amazing key all we have left is the area down here that partly has to do with vignetting so the area is darker than the green that we picked most people will tell you to lower the Shadows until they disappear yes they will disappear but that would eat holes into my dark shirt again let me zoom in to show you so I'll reset the Shadows there are actually two ways to get rid of that area here first I could just edit my garbage mask I could scroll up to the opacity section click on mask one and if I hover over the area here A Plus appears next to the pen tool that way I can add so-called anchor points I'll add one here and another one there and then I will drag the corner Anchor Point towards the center to mask the dark Edge out in Premiere Pro anchor points are a pain though as you can see I could do the same on the other side too but what if I moved around in my clip and walked towards the edge that would mean I'll leave the mask and I will be cut off so let me undo the anchor points and show you a more elegant solution first I will apply a mask to the second Ultra key effect the one for the body so make sure to scroll down to that instant of the effect click the pen tool and draw a mask what you care about is the corners that are still badly keyed so set the anchor points so that the mask excludes these areas now we have the outer edge of the frame uncade to get rid of it we just have to add a third instance of the ultra key effect onto the clip rename it to corners and pick a key color and paste the one from the dark corner that keys out the dark area but might leave brighter greens untouched or just desaturated since we will hardly ever move to this area within the frame and definitely not without hair we can keyed out even more aggressively for this clip raising to pedestal works very well other Clips might require to lower the Shadows or highlights too what we now have is a pretty awesome key considering how bad our starting point was let me zoom in on the hair we didn't even have a rim light for that clip so that is a very good result so far so good we've been talking about moving around in your frame if I move around my head will leave the mask that we created for the hair remember that was the first instance of the altercare effect and suddenly the head will move into the more aggressively set second instance of the key and that would eat Away Hair we don't like that do we there are two or beta set even three solutions first you can keyframe or in other words animate The Mask path click the stopwatch here and that will automatically set your first keyframe move your playhead forward within the clip until the head leaves the mask drag the center of the Mask to move it around and with it keep your head within the mask that way your hair will always stay within the mask the second option is theoretically you could track the head by clicking the play button here but that is quite time consuming particularly if your computer is not that fast so let's stop that the third solution is by far the best namely not creating rubbish green screen footage in the first place let's imagine you followed my advice from the first two video of this series and are able to bring a well-lit clip like this into your timeline and key it you won't even need to create a mask for the head because everything is almost perfectly keyed with one single click so you can freely move around within your frame without having to worry to leave your hairs on so let me show you how quickly I'll work on a well-lit clip but before I do I realize that you haven't clicked the like button yet you would help me to climb the search results on YouTube and therefore make more ad Revenue so if you feel like you want to give something back this would be your chance thank you but now to my speed workflow I'll add the ultra key effect pick a color near the hair and won't touch any of the other settings here that leaves me with a very slight vignette in the corner so I'll create a mask over the first instance of the ultra key and only exclude the corners then I'll add a second Ultra key effect pick the color from the darkest corner and I'm set I don't even have to touch any of the sliders all I do is pick the color that takes me 30 seconds so more speed and better result and talking about speed usually when you create videos similar to mine you have several Clips or takes rather than just one the good news is you only have to do the keying once then copy all the settings by clicking on the clip in the timeline and pressing command or Ctrl C for copy on the keyboard then click on the clip you want to apply these settings to and shift plus command or control V to paste the settings in the dialog box you have to check the boxes for all the settings that you want to paste hit enter and you're set you can even multiple select several clips that only the same keying and then paste the settings to all of them at once so it's a super quick green screen edit that only takes a few seconds for all the Clips in your timeline if your starting material is good if it is not you can still copy and paste but may have to double check because the head and hair mask may not be positioned well according to your movement within the frame so the built-in tool in Premiere Pro is pretty awesome it just has one downside if your background spills some light on bright hair or skin like I showed you in the second video of the screen screen tutorial series it's almost impossible to remove that spill without giving a complete video a magenta-ish color cast this is where I recommend a different plugin with a beautiful name Hawaii kikir from FX Factory I won't get into detail on that one let me just recommend to have a look at their website and download the trial version it has built-in primary and secondary keys and a built-in AI power tracker that is much faster than the tracking method within the ultra key that makes it particularly useful for full body green screen work we are not done yet what is very important in regard to green screen is matching the look of your green screen clip to our new background particularly if it is not a uniform background like I use them in my videos but rather an image or a clip it looks awful if the background has a totally different white balance than your green screen clip or if the brightness and contrast are totally different too that's where the built-in lumetri color is a pretty cool tool but every video editor has a similar tool and they will all work very much the same I will only show you how four sliders make a lot of a difference first the temperature then the tint exposure and contrast the single changes probably look total but have a look at the before and the after worth it right it's not rocket science playing with these four sliders makes all of a difference of course you can go much further but that would go beyond this tutorial just go to YouTube and search for lumetri color and you look at tons of tutorials for color grading so much for this series if there is enough interest I'll also create a Photoshop tutorial for green screen photography so let me know in the comments if you're interested and maybe if you're late to the game it already exists just search my video list see you next time my friends

Channel: Wolf Amri

Views: 24,313

Keywords: green screen editing, green screen, green screen premiere pro, green screen ultra key, green screen tutorial premiere pro, green screen tutorial ultra key, ultra key tutorial, green screen tips, green screen secrets, Ultra Key settings, stacking green screen, ultra key tips, green screen editing tips, improve green screen, how to improve green screen, how to green screen, ultra key how to, green screen tutorial, green screen tricks premiere pro, premiere pro green screen

Id: 1DmsQcss2gc

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2023