Sky Replacement Tutorial with Mocha + Primatte Studio

hi I'm Mary poplin with Boris effects and today we're going to talk about how to do a sky replacement we're gonna replace the sky on this lovely horse shot and we're going to talk about some compositing tricks to make this look really nice we're going to use the new BCC Prime at Studio to pull a key for the sky and we're going to use the mocha Pro insert tool to replace the sky itself we downloaded this clip from our friends at pond5 when working with stock footage sometimes we select a shot for its content but we might like to make some changes to make it fit our project better for example I love this shot of the woman and horse but I want to change the sky to be a little bit more colorful so let's get started so here's my original plate inside of After Effects and we're going to drag our sky into this shot as well and that's my sky now don't worry about the sky being a still because we're going to use the insert modules 3d offset to animate this so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna name this original plate only spelled right and we're gonna duplicate this and we're gonna call this Prime at studio key we're gonna go to our effects and presets we're gonna grab BCC Prime at Studio and drag and drop it right on to our lair now we're going to our heads-up display which is right here let's hide our background what I like about Prime at studio is that it's very visual we can either use a point to select or we can use a rectangle to grab a larger area we can also use clean background to start pulling more color in our key even though we have a completely unevenly lit sky we can still pull a pretty decent key I'm gonna hit clean foreground real quick and clean up some of this edge of this horse here so that we don't lose our light wrap and right away you can see we have a pretty robust key you can see our final mat looks pretty good we're gonna add a little edge correction and let's add a little softness to the edge of our mat by using hybrid enable and that's gonna get rid of a lot of our spill on our edges now I'm not going to worry too much about this soft detail down here towards the bottom and the sunlight because I actually want to keep this lens flare and if I replace the sky all the way down where this lens flare is the lighting is not gonna look correct so we're actually gonna use a mocha mask to keep this detail on a later level let's turn our original plate back on and we're going to change our BG color to get rid of some of that darkness that we had let's select our original plate and let's find mocha Pro let's duplicate our original plate and call this sky replacement mocha Pro I'm going to navigate to mocha Pro and we're going to drag and drop that right on to our sky replacement layer now let's track our background I can see that this area is fairly visible throughout the entire shot so I'm going to draw a mask right around this texture I'm gonna turn my grid and surface full on so I can see what my tract is doing and because this is a background plate we actually don't want to track share in perspective share in perspective are going to give us warping detail that we don't need when you're tracking a background it's moving so far back in parallax that share in perspective are not visible so we're gonna do translation scale and rotation and we're gonna hit Trek backwards now we're tracking backwards because we wanted to find an area that was never obscured because that makes tracking easier so we're just gonna let this mocha track follow this tree throughout the shot and when we're done we'll composite the sky in tracking has been sped up because I don't wanna make you sit through tracking 615 frames at about a half second a frame now because that part of the tree when I was screened were just going to grab our shape and move it over we're just gonna keep tracking that tree backwards notice how when I move the shape it doesn't change what the track is doing it just changes where the track is looking you can only trust the surface and grid tool to show you what the track is doing not the shape because the shape can be animated independently of the surface and grid tool because the shape tool is a child of the track now let's check our track looks really good to me so now I'm gonna save this and close it and I want to show you how we can bring our JPEG in from our comp in after-effects let's go to our module renders and we're gonna select our insert layer and we're going to select sky JPEG so now when I launch mocha I can select my layer and click my insert clip insert layer and you can see there's my sky right inside my surface tool let's go ahead and expand my surface tool by hitting a line selected surface that will put my surface tool to the edges of my shot I'm gonna expand this a little bit so as you can see we're scaling up and rotating and we probably really don't want to do that if we're a sky we probably only want to move in translation to reflect the camera movement so this is where I can show you how to use your dope sheet we're going to go into our track tab and you can see we have translation X translation Y rotation scale shear and perspective we're actually going to just leave translation X and translation Y and then everything underneath that we're gonna delete so now I've just got translation and let's see what that looks like that's much more realistic let's make sure our sky is arranged nicely what I like about the insert tool is that it goes semi-transparent so you can really see where you're placing everything now we've got a much more natural motion to our sky the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my insert tab and inside of my insert tab I'm going to jump over to the transform we're actually going to apply a 3d offset to this track so we're gonna make a depth pass so let's hit apply 3d offset and let's put a depth pass of 0.1 now you can see that that changes the scale of my object quite a bit so we're gonna go ahead and actually increase our scale to 1.6 and let's make a depth pass of actually 0.01 maybe a scale of 1.5 and I feel like what that'll do is that'll give me just a little bit of pushback on my sky while still remaining glued to the track this is actually just a really quick way to do a fake 3d offset inside of the mocha insert tool it'll make the sky feel a little bit more natural we're gonna save this and close it and inside of my insert I'm gonna do an insert cut out and hit render now as you can see we have some problems if you look at our trees we're in a light part of trees touches the dark background it doesn't look very natural so let's duplicate our original plate and let's call this lighting adjust we're gonna drag this above our sky replacement and we're gonna do a screen what's adjuster opacity a little bit and now I want to isolate this effect so that we're just screening down here at the bottom of our shot I want it to be nice and blue up at the top of our shot so let's launch our mocha on our previous layer let's name this sky replace Trek let's turn our gear off lock it and hide it let's hide our insert layer and lock it again and now let's draw a nice mask along the bottom of our shot and call this flare replace we're gonna link this to our sky replace Trek I'm gonna use the uber key pull my mask out now that I'll offset animate my mask I'm going to export my shape data as mocha shape data for After Effects if I had this mocha plug-in on the layer that I'm gonna paste this onto I would not do this I just use apply mask but instead I'm going to copy it so we're gonna copy the clipboard we're going to put our insert layer back Save and close we make sure we're selected on our lighting adjust layer we go to edit paste mocha mask and now my mask will be right here I'm gonna twirl down my mask and add a feather I can still see a little bit of feathering problems here so I'm gonna do a mask expansion of about a hundred maybe 200 all right and I feel like that takes care of that problem I can even come in and composite the Sun back in because I feel like we're losing it so let's duplicate original layer move that above our lighting adjust let's call this our Sun replace launch mocha we're gonna set our insert to none draw a shape right around our Sun call the Sun we're gonna link it to our sky replace track looks pretty good let's take our insert clip and put it back at our insert layer select our Sun export shape data copy that to the clipboard Save & close click on Sun replace make sure we're on our first layer edit paste mocha mask we're gonna add another fairly extreme feather and now we have our bright Sun in the background but if you look at our sky replacement we get a lot more detail back in our sky now I do see some compositing problems in here for instance I see we're losing the side of the horse and I see that we don't have a lot of black background so let's put our heads up display up let's clean our foreground and just select the side of the horse and that cleans up her horse now that cleans up a lot of our foreground but we're losing a lot of detail on our background tree here and these edges of these background trees over here so what I'm gonna do is slightly cheat I'm gonna take my original plane and duplicate it I'm gonna call this darken tree edges drag this all the way above because we have such a white background and I'm gonna hit darken I'm actually gonna hit multiply and just like that we can get a pretty nice key and a pretty excellent sky replace so here's our before and here's our after special thanks to pond5 for their generous donation of the stock footage if you need stock footage visit WWE have any questions you can find us online at you

Channel: Boris FX

Views: 16,870

Keywords: Boris FX, keying, motion tracking, sky replacement, Adobe After Effects, AE, tutorial, planar tracking, VFX, visual effects, mary poplin, chroma keying, pond5, before/after, primatte, Avid, premiere pro, mocha pro, c4d r19 after effect tutorial 2018, adbe stock, after effect green screen tutorial

Id: a_faH779350

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 08 2018