IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Rich Harrington: Hi, I'd like to welcome you to this
course on Green Screen Photography and Video.
| | 00:07 | My name is Rich Harrington.
Abba Shapiro: And I'm Abba Shapiro.
| | 00:09 | Rich: And today we've got a
lot of great things to tackle.
| | 00:12 | Now just to give you a little bit of our
background, Abba and I both work in the photo and video
| | 00:16 | industry, and we're going to take a look
at a real-world shoot here and sort of focus
| | 00:20 | on both shooting photography and
video, back to back on the same set.
| | 00:24 | Abba: Now, one of the things about shooting
photography is you're using strobes, and it's
| | 00:29 | a whole different type of light and lighting.
| | 00:31 | But a lot of times, there is a situation
where you need to get both stills and video, and
| | 00:35 | we're going to tackle that.
| | 00:36 | Rich: Yeah, so you're going to learn how
to shoot both stills and video simultaneously
| | 00:41 | as well as best practices when
lighting for just photography or just video.
| | 00:46 | So it's a great way to get started.
| | 00:47 | We're going to take a look at a
real-world project, and let's jump in.
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| What you should know before watching this course| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: We're just about ready to jump in,
but a lot of you are wondering, what do I need
| | 00:03 | to know before I take this class?
| | 00:05 | Well, this course is designed for users
of all levels, beginner through advanced.
| | 00:09 | What this means is, is we're going to throw
out some really good core concepts to make
| | 00:12 | sure everyone is on the same page, but you
might hear some advanced information, and
| | 00:16 | if you're not ready for it yet, that's okay.
| | 00:18 | You can always come back and
watch the class again later.
| | 00:20 | But users of all levels will be able to
get things done using these techniques.
| | 00:24 | However, I do recommend that you take some
time to actually get to know your camera first.
| | 00:28 | Abba Shapiro: Yeah, it's important to understand
your camera being able to control aperture,
| | 00:32 | shutter speed, depth of field,
and just knowing focal length.
| | 00:36 | So, having a basic understanding of how to
control your camera is important, and we'll
| | 00:40 | try to cover everything else
within the framework of the course.
| | 00:43 | Rich: Okay, so with that in mind, let's
jump in and start to explore how we're going to
| | 00:48 | put all these pieces together.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: If your lynda.com membership includes
it, we do have some hands-on exercise files.
| | 00:04 | Throughout the shoot today, we're going to
generate some different frames, both still
| | 00:08 | and video, and we'll give you a few
selected shots so you could practice.
| | 00:12 | We're also going to include some background
plates that we've put together so you could
| | 00:15 | try out the keying and compositing work
using your favorite post-production software.
| | 00:19 | Now, if you don't have access
to these files, no big deal.
| | 00:22 | Just take some of the own material that you shoot
and apply it to the lessons as we go forward.
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1. An Introduction to Green ScreenWhy use green screen for photography?| 00:00 | Abba Shapiro: So Rich, let's talk about why we
would want to do Green Screen for Photography.
| | 00:04 | A lot of photographers are used to shooting
with black backgrounds and white backgrounds
| | 00:08 | and different paper drops, but green
screen gives us something very unique.
| | 00:12 | Rich Harrington: Yeah, I think ultimately, it's all about
flexibility and the ability to cut down post-production time.
| | 00:20 | You're right, a lot people are used to using
the neutral gray or the dark black backdrops
| | 00:24 | or white and paper ones, and
that's what you find in studios.
| | 00:27 | People hear green screen and
they think cheesy special effects.
| | 00:31 | Now, there is a reason why it exists for those
cheesy special effects because it's so easy to do.
| | 00:36 | Abba: And I think that's the key is that
green is a color that's opposite of skin,
| | 00:42 | and it's very easy to pull a key without a
lot of third-party software, without having
| | 00:47 | to do a lot of masking.
| | 00:48 | And so it actually will make things easier
in the post-production, and you just do a
| | 00:53 | simple setup in the production as we have in
the background here of just the green backdrop.
| | 00:56 | We'll go into that a little bit later.
| | 00:58 | Rich: Yeah, I think the main idea here is
that by making some small adjustments into
| | 01:03 | how you shoot, you spend less time in post-production,
and a big thing that folks are starting to
| | 01:08 | realize is that for everyday of shooting, there is
2 to 4 days of post-production on a typical shoot.
| | 01:15 | So, you want to save time where it
really matters, and that's on the backend.
| | 01:19 | So, one of those specific workflows is
really using this for practical things.
| | 01:24 | We're shooting portraits.
| | 01:26 | So we're doing things, and
this just happened the other day.
| | 01:30 | We got my son's grade school pictures and
they showed him on eight different backdrops,
| | 01:35 | I had my pick, and I was like, wow, that's
kind of good because I don't like that backdrop
| | 01:40 | but I like that one, and it dawned on me that
if the photographer had to pre-negotiate with
| | 01:46 | every single parent, which backdrop do you
want for your child and oh, okay, let's schedule
| | 01:52 | all of these children on this backdrop and then
these children, it would just be a logistics nightmare.
| | 01:57 | And so, they have this great flexibility, and
what it ultimately does is let the photographer
| | 02:03 | sell more pictures when it comes time to portraits,
and that's really good for standard portraits.
| | 02:07 | It's also good for sports, right?
| | 02:10 | Abba: Absolutely. Sports is one of the great things to
use green screen for, whether you're shooting individual
| | 02:14 | portraits or if you're shooting a team shot.
| | 02:17 | A lot of times, it might not be the season
that they're actually playing that sport.
| | 02:21 | For instance, it might be a fall sport but
you're shooting their headshots in the summer,
| | 02:25 | you could always get a fall backdrop.
| | 02:28 | I kind of like the idea that you have, again, the
flexibility of putting the players wherever you want.
| | 02:33 | You can put them on the field or you
can put them in a specific location.
| | 02:36 | Rich: This also has benefits for
those people doing special effects.
| | 02:40 | There is a big industry, parties, events you
see at amusement parks of people doing things
| | 02:46 | like magazine covers or
dropping people into destinations.
| | 02:50 | This is just one more type for event
photographers to have that flexibility.
| | 02:54 | I have seen this at weddings too.
| | 02:56 | It just opens up a whole bunch of
things with that flexibility for post.
| | 03:00 | I think it really stands out, and as people
are going to see as we tackle this technique,
| | 03:04 | it's really not that hard.
| | 03:06 | The key here is all about flexibility, the
fact that not only can you change the background
| | 03:11 | but I like the fact that you get much
greater control over lighting and depth of field.
| | 03:16 | I'll be in a situation where I want to get
those lights in really close to my subject
| | 03:20 | for a particular look.
| | 03:21 | But if I were shooting that,
it would destroy my backdrop.
| | 03:24 | But since I can shoot them and keep the lights
nice and close for an intimate setup, I could
| | 03:28 | just cut those out and then
put whatever I need back there.
| | 03:31 | Abba: I mean you could
even make it more realistic.
| | 03:33 | There is a lot of times if you're shooting--
let's go back to the sports analogy--somebody
| | 03:37 | on a field, but you can't light a football
field, but you can light a person, and then
| | 03:41 | you can go, and you can get the shot of the
football field, and then you can composite
| | 03:45 | them together, and even add a little bit of
blur so you've created that depth of field
| | 03:49 | so it looks like they were
really out there at the time.
| | 03:52 | Rich: You bring up a good point.
| | 03:54 | Sometimes it's difficult to light those
backgrounds but you can go with a slower exposure time.
| | 03:59 | You could shoot that nighttime field with
a three-second exposure and get a beautiful
| | 04:04 | exposure with the lights coming in or the
background, or shoot for the nighttime skyline.
| | 04:09 | But doing that and getting the action you
need on the portrait, it would never work.
| | 04:13 | So this is all about creating great
composite images, and that's going to be something we
| | 04:18 | cover at the back part of this course.
| | 04:20 | You, and I are going to jump into some
popular software tools and show people how to both
| | 04:24 | composite images for still and
then ultimately video work as well.
| | 04:28 | Abba: Now, one other area that I want to
make sure that people understand again, it's
| | 04:32 | all about flexibility and profitability is
that you can change backgrounds as things change.
| | 04:37 | In the corporate world a lot of times you might
want to get a shot of 20 employees but you
| | 04:43 | can't go to 20 different
locations, 20 different offices.
| | 04:45 | So, what you can do is shoot them in a
green screen environment and then go around and
| | 04:50 | shoot different parts of the building, and
then you can composite them into a certain
| | 04:54 | location, and if things change if they
move buildings or if branding changes, you can
| | 04:59 | very easily swap out the background.
Now, I know you've done some of this yourself.
| | 05:03 | Rich: Yeah, future changes are critical
and the idea there is that you can continue to
| | 05:08 | get value out of the material you shot and
clients will get busy, budgets will get tight,
| | 05:15 | there's been a lot of projects where we've
had to do new post-production work for new
| | 05:19 | projects that have come up but not new field
production work, and that really stands out.
| | 05:23 | So that's a lot of the reasons to
shoot green screen with photography.
| | 05:26 | In a second, let's take a look at the
video angle, and then we'll start to light.
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| Why use green screen for video?| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: A lot of folks watching this video
are newer to video, maybe they are photographer
| | 00:04 | shooters, and even those have been doing video
for a long time, there is a lot more to shooting
| | 00:09 | green screen for video than there is for
photography, and I think people don't always understand
| | 00:14 | the reasons of why we shoot green screen.
| | 00:16 | Abba Shapiro: Now, before we get into that detail,
if they haven't watched the earlier movie
| | 00:20 | about the advantages of shooting green screen,
I think they should go back and watch that
| | 00:24 | because that really does cover a lot of the
reasons why you want to shoot green screen
| | 00:28 | for both profitability and ease of post.
| | 00:30 | Rich: Absolutely, and I think the main
thing here to take away is that I've seen people
| | 00:36 | try to do keying like luma keys for video or we'll
shoot on a dark background, we'll knock that out.
| | 00:41 | Oh, there's this great new feature in After
Effects, the Roto Brush, we'll cut them out.
| | 00:45 | You can rotoscope where you cut
people out of the backgrounds.
| | 00:49 | You could do all this complex work, but it
is never as good as a good key, and that's
| | 00:54 | because you're going to see chattering in
the matte, it's going to look jumpy, you're
| | 00:58 | going to have weird edges, it's
going to be feathered too much.
| | 01:01 | So it really becomes necessary to say,
you know what, I want that flexibility.
| | 01:05 | I want that ability to swap out the background.
I am going to shoot this right.
| | 01:09 | I think people just need to realize that
there are some technical advantages, and I think
| | 01:14 | one of the big things that we should just
get out of the away right in the beginning
| | 01:16 | is a lot of people say, well, why
blue screen or why green screen?
| | 01:20 | I think unless there's a really good reason if
you're shooting video, green is the way to go.
| | 01:24 | Abba: Yeah, and the reason green is the good
way to go is because we look at our skin tone,
| | 01:29 | and if you've looked at a Color Wheel is that
skin tone is the opposite side of Chroma key green.
| | 01:34 | So when you start removing the green color,
you don't have to worry about removing the
| | 01:38 | skin tone, and that works really well because of
the sensitivity of video cameras to the color green.
| | 01:45 | What about blue?
| | 01:46 | Rich: Well, blue is going to
work well for a couple of things.
| | 01:48 | Blue has less noise in a film workflow.
| | 01:52 | But when dealing with video, the really only
reason to shoot blue is if your subject and
| | 01:57 | the clothing choices have a lot of green in it.
| | 01:59 | So if you need to key a
product that has green, go to blue.
| | 02:03 | If you need to key a situation where you've
got somebody wearing green clothing or using
| | 02:08 | a green product, go to blue,
otherwise, for most video, stick with green.
| | 02:13 | I think it's pretty straightforward.
| | 02:15 | Now, the post-production
side of this is more complex.
| | 02:19 | In Photoshop, it's so easy to just make a quick
selection to the background, hit Delete and Done.
| | 02:23 | With video, we start to get more needs to
adjust the lighting in post-production to
| | 02:29 | really refine the matte, and video has just more
limitations because the image is so much more compressed.
| | 02:37 | Abba: It's interesting to
notice that people do move.
| | 02:40 | You talked about this and yes, you can go
rotoscope which is frame by frame, but when
| | 02:46 | people move, green screen is much easier to
track when you're actually doing the post-production,
| | 02:51 | and they have to remember that, if you just
been shooting a lot of stills, and you start
| | 02:55 | using that video part of your camera, the
ability to shoot video and kind of mix it
| | 03:00 | up, then using green screen is a lot more
valuable than using a black or a white background.
| | 03:05 | Rich: So, this is all about future
flexibility and the ability to make changes.
| | 03:10 | We've teased you enough and have
preached to you about the benefits of this.
| | 03:13 | Let's jump in and start to see the techniques.
| | 03:15 | We're going to light the studio, and then we'll bring
the model in, and we'll get some great stills and video.
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2. Prepping the Green ScreenSetting the room| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: So before we start shooting green screen,
I just want to talk a little bit about the room.
| | 00:04 | And you see here, we are in a pretty
big space, and that's kind of important.
| | 00:08 | Abba, why do we need this much space?
| | 00:10 | Abba Shapiro: Well, we need this much
space for a couple of reasons.
| | 00:13 | First of all, for the green screen alone, the
more space you have the better it is because
| | 00:17 | you can really control the distance of the
talent to your camera to the green screen.
| | 00:21 | Rich: If I've got my green
screen here, that's great.
| | 00:24 | We're going to want to go ahead and step
forward a little bit and put our subject in, because
| | 00:29 | if our subject is too close to the green
screen, he or she is going to get spill reflecting
| | 00:33 | onto them, so that's great.
| | 00:35 | But then we have to go in front of that to
put our cameras, so there's going to be cameras
| | 00:40 | up there that we're shooting with the still
cameras, the video cameras, because we need
| | 00:43 | some distance between our subject, making things
even more complex, we have cameras shooting us today.
| | 00:49 | So, it's kind of like the camera shooting,
the camera shooting the subject, shooting
| | 00:53 | the fake background, so we need a lot of space.
| | 00:56 | So when you are doing green screen, I think
the biggest problem people have is they shoot
| | 01:01 | in small rooms and they put their
subjects right up on the screen.
| | 01:04 | Abba: Right, and that's a real problem because
then you have to deal with shadows and reflection.
| | 01:08 | Really, the larger and longer space you can
get, the easier it is to actually not only
| | 01:14 | shoot your green screen
but then to composite it.
| | 01:16 | Rich: Yeah, so look for a big empty room
if you have access or perhaps a conference
| | 01:21 | room, but the big thing is don't let that
subject get too close to the backdrop, otherwise,
| | 01:25 | there is going to be Chroma spill and the
green or the blue will bounce back on to them.
| | 01:29 | Abba: So, this is a pretty good space,
and there's one more thing you should keep in
| | 01:32 | mind, if you are used to shooting just stills,
video is a whole different animal because
| | 01:37 | you have to deal with sound and have to deal
with audio, so when you select the room, if
| | 01:42 | it's in a warehouse where you're hearing dump trucks
all over the place, you're not going to get good audio.
| | 01:47 | So don't just think about lights and space, also
listen to the room, so you can hear how it sounds.
| | 01:55 | For when you bring your talent,
you don't have to fight that noise.
| | 01:57 | Rich: Yeah, and that's always the
tough thing, finding a good space.
| | 02:00 | But if you look around, and you need a studio
space, you could usually find one in a local
| | 02:03 | market or work with other places.
| | 02:06 | Sometimes you'll find places
that are huge like a gymnasium.
| | 02:09 | If you go there off hours, you might have
access to it, but with green screen, you need
| | 02:13 | that big open space.
Well, we we've got an idea here.
| | 02:16 | It's a big empty room, and I think what we
need to do now is start setting up the backdrop,
| | 02:20 | so you see how the green screen process works.
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| Using a fabric backdrop| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: One of the most standard type of backdrops
used is simply fabric, and people get really hung up.
| | 00:06 | There are people who swear by specialty
fabrics or it has to be a particular brand.
| | 00:10 | There are so many options out there when
it comes to just choosing a background.
| | 00:14 | Abba Shapiro: Now, you don't want to just buy like
a tarp, but there are a lot of options out
| | 00:19 | there to get a Chroma key green background.
| | 00:21 | So, they are pretty reasonably priced, and
because they are fabric, they are pretty easy
| | 00:25 | to travel with and store.
| | 00:27 | Rich: Yeah, this particular one we have
here has a bit of a foam texture to it.
| | 00:31 | The nice thing is, is because it's got a little weight
to the fabric, it's not going to show wrinkles as much.
| | 00:36 | One of the big things you want to avoid
are things like muslin or normal cotton cloth
| | 00:41 | which really has wrinkles.
| | 00:43 | Wrinkles are very problematic when you go to key
something, because you want it as even as possible.
| | 00:48 | So putting this green
screen together is pretty simple.
| | 00:51 | What's going to happen is
is we just pop up the bar.
| | 00:54 | In this case we're using a typical fabric
bar that we would use to hang a backdrop.
| | 00:58 | It's a lot like a shower rod except at the end are two
pieces that make it easy to attach to lighting stands.
| | 01:04 | So in this case, we're going to go ahead and
use some C-stands instead of lighting stands
| | 01:07 | and Abba, why would we do that?
| | 01:09 | Abba: Well, a C-stand is a lot stronger than a
simple light stand, and you can easily hang a crossbar.
| | 01:16 | So it can hold a lot more weight, you don't
have to worry about it collapsing on itself.
| | 01:20 | Rich: Yeah, you definitely
want safety first on set.
| | 01:23 | So, we're using those C-stands, and you'll
see here, we're raising up the bar, working
| | 01:27 | to keep it even, so make sure there's good
communication between you and an assistant.
| | 01:31 | This is not the sort of
thing you could do on your own.
| | 01:33 | It takes two people to raise this type of
backdrop, so make sure you have an assistant
| | 01:38 | or another production person with you on set.
| | 01:41 | Worse case scenario, recruit your talent,
but you want to keep it pretty safe.
| | 01:45 | Additionally, we're also going to drop
sandbags on the bottom of those C-stands, because the
| | 01:49 | last thing you want is to hurt
the people that you're working with.
| | 01:52 | You don't want this backdrop to come
tumbling forward in the middle of a shoot and land
| | 01:56 | on folks, because it's not the fabric that's
going to hurt them, but the giant metal stands
| | 01:59 | or crossbeams could definitely hurt.
| | 02:02 | You don't want to knock over any lights, cause
any fires, or just have general mayhem on your set.
| | 02:07 | Once we've got that raised, we'll go ahead
and actually clamp it off and then use a couple
| | 02:11 | of more sandbags at the base, so it further
sort of pulls it out and remove any wrinkles.
| | 02:17 | So a lot of folks like to get on the set early
and put the green screen up first, Abba, why is that?
| | 02:22 | Abba: Well, it's one of the bigger
things that you're going to be working with.
| | 02:26 | Once you have your lights set up, and if
you have your camera set up, and then you have
| | 02:28 | this big cloth and the C-stands to work with,
you're more likely to knock something over,
| | 02:33 | and since this is the biggest bulkiest object
that you're working with, I like to hang this
| | 02:37 | first and then stretch it out so it's nice
and smooth, and then I can start moving my
| | 02:41 | lights and sometimes it's even on top
of the green screen and set up my camera.
| | 02:45 | Rich: The real advantage there too is that
by setting it up early, you can let some of
| | 02:50 | the wrinkles fall out, and you know what
you're actually putting those lights up for.
| | 02:54 | So, now that you've got the hang of
this, it's really a matter of balance.
| | 02:58 | If you want the most flexibility with a very large
backdrop, using fabric is going to give you good options.
| | 03:03 | However, you might be in a situation where
you don't have the manpower to go ahead and
| | 03:07 | put that in place or the space.
| | 03:09 | In that case, we can go ahead and take a look at
other more portable options to get the job done.
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| Using a Flexfill backdrop| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: Let's talk a little bit
about photography green screen.
| | 00:02 | Obviously, the backdrop behind us
would work just fine. It's even.
| | 00:07 | It's big, but it's going to
take a lot of work to set up.
| | 00:09 | It's got a bar, crossbars, clamps, it's not bad.
Abba Shapiro: We need something portable.
| | 00:14 | Rich: Yeah, so a lot of photographers and
even video folks prefer sort of a flexi-fill,
| | 00:19 | and this is a lot like what they are
already used to using as a reflector.
| | 00:21 | Abba: Yeah, as a matter of fact, you're
used to using these reflectors or diffusers that
| | 00:24 | just pop open, same technology.
| | 00:26 | As a matter of fact, it looks small right
now, but when it opens up, it's pretty big.
| | 00:31 | Rich: Yeah, so, in this case here it's about
five foot by eight, lots of room to work with.
| | 00:36 | We've got green on one side.
| | 00:37 | We can go ahead and turn it around and
blue on the other, so really versatile.
| | 00:44 | Abba: And the other thing I really like about
this is that, we can use it either horizontally
| | 00:48 | if we had a couple of people or if we we're
shooting somebody tall like yourself, we could
| | 00:52 | actually turn it vertically, and we could frame it
and very quickly do a blue or green screen a view.
| | 00:58 | Rich: Yeah, so a lot of
flexibility here for a full body shots.
| | 01:01 | Let's go ahead and walk this back,
and we're just going to go to the green.
| | 01:05 | Abba: Yeah, let's go ahead and
why don't we put it sideways for now?
| | 01:07 | Rich: Okay, here we go.
| | 01:11 | I'm just going to swing around here, and we're putting
this into a couple of C-stands using a Matthew's head.
| | 01:18 | Abba: The trick is when putting these up is
not to try to stretch it out full when you start.
| | 01:24 | Leave a little bit of space, and then you can
tighten it up once you have it in the clamps.
| | 01:28 | Rich: All right, so that's pretty good.
| | 01:30 | Let's raise it and notice it makes it
really easy to adjust the height for our subject.
| | 01:35 | Now, we're working with a little bit of a
shorter person that's probably plenty of room there.
| | 01:39 | Abba: Yeah, I think that's good, and once
we get it lit, we can move it up and down
| | 01:42 | pretty darn easily.
Rich: Now, that's great.
| | 01:45 | Here, we've got some lights off to the side.
| | 01:47 | Same ideas, we talked about with the other
backdrop, you want to go ahead and have things even.
| | 01:52 | Right now, you're seeing
some terrible hotspots here.
| | 01:54 | We're going to want to work that out, so
let's walk these two lights in and just get them
| | 01:58 | to properly disperse.
Bring those in a little bit.
| | 02:06 | Abba: Yours seems a
little bit hotter than mine.
| | 02:08 | Rich: Yeah, I'm at 100.
| | 02:10 | Abba: I'm on 100, but I think you're a little
bit closer, so we'll just go ahead, and we'll
| | 02:15 | notch them both down.
| | 02:20 | Your goal here is to get it a nice even
green. I'll open mine up. There we go.
| | 02:28 | Rich: Good, so we've
created a good even pull there.
| | 02:31 | Now obviously, we're judging this off of
the video camera and not the DSLR camera that
| | 02:36 | we're going to actually be shooting with or
the photography camera when we're shooting DSLR.
| | 02:39 | So this got a lot more to cover with lighting,
but the general idea here is that we want
| | 02:44 | to get this background of the green very even.
| | 02:47 | So before we walk away from these lights to
the naked eye, that's looking pretty even,
| | 02:51 | and we can then tweak it once we start
to explore lighting in greater detail.
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| Using a Reflecmedia backdrop| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: One other type of keying technology
that we often use at my facility is Reflecmedia,
| | 00:04 | and it sometimes goes by other brand names,
but essentially, it's a disk like this, and
| | 00:09 | it's a bunch of LEDs, and what it
does is it's going to hit that backdrop.
| | 00:13 | So Abba, what's behind us?
| | 00:15 | Abba Shapiro: Well, it looks like it's just a plain
gray backdrop, but it's not a gray backdrop.
| | 00:19 | Actually, it's a special backdrop that works
exclusively with this type of lighting system.
| | 00:24 | Rich: So I'm shinning that back there, and
you kind of see that it's picking up the blue.
| | 00:28 | You'll probably wonder, well,
how the heck does that work?
| | 00:31 | The thing is this goes around the camera,
typically used with the video camera and what
| | 00:35 | it does is because it's perfectly inline with
the lens, it just hits that and bounces back.
| | 00:40 | These are low level LEDs and what they do
is that's basically a fiber optic curtain.
| | 00:45 | It's a bunch of crushed
glass beads woven in together.
| | 00:48 | You can get this pop-ups or curtains.
The fabric is one of the most expensive parts.
| | 00:53 | You've got to be very careful with that,
you don't want to walk on it or scrape it.
| | 00:56 | The key advantage here is that unlike some
of these other methods where we've had to
| | 01:00 | light the green screen separately, you
don't have to light the green screen.
| | 01:03 | I use this in conference rooms, small spaces
all the time, when we have to fly and do green
| | 01:08 | screen for client project, this is great.
It just packs it in.
| | 01:11 | So, we're going to go ahead here and cut to
Abba's camera, and you see the plain gray backdrop.
| | 01:16 | What I'm going to do is put the ring on the camera here
and turn it on, and I want you to see what happens.
| | 01:23 | Abba: So as you see it's gray, and now, if
you look behind me, perfect Chroma key blue.
| | 01:31 | Rich: Yeah, and obviously, we can play
with the Brightness settings and the distance,
| | 01:36 | but it's definitely working.
| | 01:37 | Abba: Now, one of the things that you want
to keep in mind is to turn off the overhead
| | 01:41 | lights in the room, because it was washing
out the background, and it wasn't working.
| | 01:46 | So make sure you understand how it works.
| | 01:48 | Read the instruction manual if you go this way,
because it's really fast, and it looks really good.
| | 01:54 | Rich: Yeah, and I recommend if you're
going try one of these systems out, rent it and
| | 01:58 | see how it works for you.
| | 02:00 | Because if you're shooting people with glasses,
this LED ring could be problematic, it's reflected.
| | 02:04 | I feel like if we're going to talk about keying,
you should know all the background solutions,
| | 02:08 | and this type of reflective
materials pretty cool workflow.
| | 02:10 | Abba: Now, if I look behind me, I see
that it's blue, but we've talked earlier about
| | 02:14 | green screen, does it come in green?
| | 02:16 | Rich: Absolutely, they make these in a variety of
colors, green and blue and even some other specialty colors.
| | 02:22 | This particular technology is really popular
with newsrooms where it's a controlled environment
| | 02:26 | and they want to have that flexibility with
different folks coming on the set, this minimizes
| | 02:31 | lighting because all you have to do now is
light your subject, not the backdrop, so it
| | 02:35 | really speeds up for those
time compressed environments.
| | 02:37 | I know that several TV studios also
use this as well for virtual sets.
| | 02:41 | Abba: I love the idea that I can carry
several different colored disks and one background,
| | 02:46 | and I can just swap them out
depending on what the talent is wearing.
| | 02:50 | Rich: Yeah, very, very flexible system,
and I think it's worth giving a shot.
| | 02:54 | Just try renting it first or
find someone that you could borrow.
| | 02:57 | It's a relatively expensive system, but if you do
Chroma keying a lot, this might be a great match.
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3. Lighting the SubjectUsing studio strobes for photo| 00:00 | Abba Shapiro: Now let's talk a little
bit about what we have set up here.
| | 00:03 | The first thing I want to look at, and
I want to show you is our strobe lights.
| | 00:07 | Now, we have three strobe lights set
up in this situation in soft boxes.
| | 00:11 | We have a primary strobe which is going to be our
Key Light or where our brightest light is coming from.
| | 00:17 | We also have a second strobe here
which is going to be our Fill Light.
| | 00:21 | Now, the fill light is going to just make
sure we can control our shadows from the key.
| | 00:27 | Finally, we put another light back here, a
final strobe, which is actually our Hair Light,
| | 00:32 | because we want to make sure there's
definitely separation, and we want to make sure that
| | 00:36 | the hair pops, and it gives it a nice feel.
| | 00:38 | Now, of course, you may not
have three lights to work with.
| | 00:42 | You might only have two
or you might only have one.
| | 00:44 | So, if that's the case, you
might want to use a reflector.
| | 00:48 | Now, Richard has a reflector, and you can
get this and they can be white, they can be
| | 00:52 | silver, they can be gold, and they can be
black, which is actually negative fill, which
| | 00:57 | sometimes you may want to use.
| | 00:59 | So don't worry that if you don't have three
lights that this won't work for you, use traditional
| | 01:04 | photography techniques and then worry about
lighting the green screen later, and we'll
| | 01:08 | talk about that in a later movie.
| | 01:10 | Now, let's take a look at actually some of
the diffusers that we're using on these lights.
| | 01:16 | If you notice, these lights are
using something called a Soft Box.
| | 01:19 | It gives a nice even lighting to the talent.
| | 01:23 | Now, you may have umbrellas or you may
have a Soft Box with a grid if you really want
| | 01:27 | to focus the lights.
| | 01:28 | Any type of lights will work to
light your talent traditionally.
| | 01:32 | So don't worry about green screen right now
when lighting your talent, light it for the
| | 01:36 | way you want them to look.
| | 01:38 | Now, if you notice in the background here,
the Hair Light doesn't have a Soft Box.
| | 01:43 | We want a lot of control there.
| | 01:45 | I really want a focused light,
so I don't have a Soft Box.
| | 01:48 | As a matter of fact, I have a Grid on here
which is going to allow me to tunnel the light,
| | 01:52 | so we can just hit the
back of the person's head.
| | 01:55 | Now, one thing you might want to be aware of is
that strobes have two types of lights in them.
| | 02:01 | They have what's called the modeling light,
which is a weaker light which gives you an
| | 02:05 | idea of how your lighting is going to be.
| | 02:08 | Then when you actually shoot the image, it
pops the strobe which is way brighter, but
| | 02:13 | you'll have an idea when using the
modeling lights, what things will look like.
| | 02:17 | As you see when we pop that,
it really blew out the scene.
| | 02:20 | So one of the key things after you start
setting up your lights is actually adjusting their
| | 02:25 | luminance, and we'll be
looking at that in a later movie.
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| Working with a light meter| 00:00 | Abba Shapiro: Now, let's look at refining our
lighting setup, making sure that our Key Light and
| | 00:05 | our Fill Light and our Back Light
do exactly what we want them to do.
| | 00:09 | Now, we did a kind of a pre-setup before,
but now we actually have the model in the
| | 00:13 | shot, and we can see how the
different lights will light her.
| | 00:16 | Now, in this movie we're going to use a Light
Meter, but if don't have a light meter don't
| | 00:20 | worry because in the next movie we're going
to show you how to do the same thing using
| | 00:23 | the Histogram on your camera.
| | 00:25 | So the first thing I want to do is I want to make sure
that my Key Light is at the luminance level that I want.
| | 00:30 | So, the trick here is first, when using a
Light Meter, depending on your camera, you're
| | 00:35 | probably going to set your shutter speed to
either 1/125th of a second or 1/250th of a second.
| | 00:42 | I'm going to be using a Canon camera, so I
like to shoot at 1/25th of a second, because
| | 00:48 | in reality, I'll be shooting a lot faster
because these strobes go off in milliseconds,
| | 00:52 | and that's going to freeze my action.
| | 00:55 | Based upon that 1/25th of a second, as I turn
these lights brighter, or I make them darker,
| | 01:02 | that's where the Light Meter comes in,
because I can then know my f-stop for my camera, so
| | 01:06 | it's perfectly balanced.
| | 01:08 | So the key that you need to know when
starting to work with a Light Meter is camera speed,
| | 01:13 | 1/25th of a second and
your ISO how sensitive it is.
| | 01:17 | Now, when you're working with
strobes usually you can keep it at 100.
| | 01:20 | Some people like to shoot at 200.
Nikons work really well at 200.
| | 01:24 | But if you find you're in a situation where
you need to really punch up the light, then
| | 01:29 | you could push it up, but that's going to
create noise, and when you create noise in
| | 01:32 | your image, it's going to be harder to key.
| | 01:35 | So try to keep it at 100 ISO
and 1/125th of a second.
| | 01:39 | Now, once we have that set, we're
going to start balancing our lights.
| | 01:42 | Now, I usually like to shoot at about f8.
| | 01:45 | F8 gives me a nice depth of field so that
our model will be completely in focus, and
| | 01:51 | this may drop off a little bit, but I really
want to make sure that if my focus isn't perfect
| | 01:56 | and my plane of focus is right here, that with an f8,
I can make sure that she's going to still be sharp.
| | 02:02 | The key is you want the eyes to be sharp in
any shot you do, because if the eyes are sharp,
| | 02:07 | the image look sharp.
| | 02:09 | Now, when I test my lights,
it's important to turn them off.
| | 02:13 | So, we want to look at one light at a time.
| | 02:17 | So Rich, go ahead and let's power down our
Fill Light and our Back Light and just get
| | 02:21 | a level for our key, so
we can see that it's in f8.
| | 02:25 | Now, this Light Meter has a little RF signal
in it, so I can actually pop my flashes while
| | 02:32 | I'm getting the levels.
| | 02:33 | If your mirror doesn't, you may be using a
PocketWizard or anything to set-off your flash
| | 02:38 | at the same time you are using your Light Meter.
| | 02:41 | If you don't have that, you can always run
a cord directly from the Light Meter into
| | 02:44 | the light to set it off.
| | 02:46 | So what I want to do is I'm going simply put my
Light Meter under the model's chin and pop it.
| | 02:53 | Then I can take a look at the reading.
This is reading about f11.
| | 02:58 | So it's a little bit
hotter than I want it to be.
| | 03:01 | Our model here is very fair skinned, so I
might even want to dial it down a little bit more.
| | 03:06 | So Rich, let's go down and dial down the
luminance on this light, so when it pops, it's going
| | 03:10 | to pop at about f8.
| | 03:12 | Now, when you're going to be setting up the
Light Meter, in this case, it's a wide shot,
| | 03:16 | I want to see what the
light falloff is going to be.
| | 03:19 | So I'll take a pop under the face,
that's the most reflective part.
| | 03:22 | Okay, we still need to dial it down a good
chunk more, and then I'm also going to take
| | 03:28 | a light reading down by her waist just to
make sure that the falloff isn't too much.
| | 03:36 | It's pretty even lighting, and
that's the nice thing about the Soft Box.
| | 03:39 | If I needed to, I could tilt this down a
little bit more so that I make sure that the entire
| | 03:43 | body is f8 or close to f8.
| | 03:46 | Now if you have a problem, if your lights
aren't bright enough or you're not getting
| | 03:51 | exactly what you want by dialing things in and out,
you can always move the Soft Box closer or further away.
| | 03:58 | Remember, with lighting, as you move something
twice as far, it's only a quarter of the brightness.
| | 04:06 | So remember it's a multiplication table.
This is where math actually comes in.
| | 04:09 | So, you move it back, two feet it's
going to be one quarter of the brightness.
| | 04:15 | You move it in, it's going
to be that much brighter.
| | 04:17 | So you can use your dials or
you can reposition the lights.
| | 04:21 | Now let's just take one more
test shot, and I'm right on f8.
| | 04:27 | So this light is perfect for my camera.
| | 04:30 | Now, we're going to go ahead, and we're
going to work on the Fill Light, so we're going
| | 04:33 | to kill our Key Light, and I want
this to be a pretty dramatic ratio.
| | 04:38 | So, probably like an f2.8, I just
want a little bit of a soft fill.
| | 04:42 | So now with this light turned off, I can do the same
thing, and when I pop it, this light is pretty hot.
| | 04:49 | It still is actually popping at f11.
| | 04:51 | So, this will become the fill,
and I don't want that to happen.
| | 04:54 | So Rich, let's turn this way down.
We want to probably try to get about a 2.8.
| | 05:02 | We're still pretty hot,
let's take it all the way down.
| | 05:06 | If we can't get it low enough, the trick
here would be simply to take the light and move
| | 05:11 | it back a little bit.
| | 05:13 | So Rich, let's go ahead and move this light
back quite a bit, because right now it's actually
| | 05:18 | so bright that it's doing the opposite,
it's actually becoming the Key Light.
| | 05:23 | So if your lights are difficult to control,
and you can't dial it down enough, that's
| | 05:27 | the perfect reason for
moving that light backwards.
| | 05:34 | That was a huge drop.
We dropped from f16 all the way down to f8.
| | 05:39 | Now my lights are balanced.
| | 05:40 | We're going to have to move it back a little bit
more if we can, to get the lighting that we want.
| | 05:46 | So as you see, it's important not only to
control your lights with the dials, but to
| | 05:51 | control the lights with the position.
That's perfect, we're right at 2.8.
| | 05:58 | So we're going to have a
pretty dramatic contrast there.
| | 06:00 | Now, we want to do the Back Light or the
Hair Light, and we may have to do a little bit
| | 06:04 | of repositioning on it, because our model
is standing on an Apple Box, so I want to
| | 06:10 | make sure that it's not lighting her
from below, because that's not natural.
| | 06:14 | We want it to be like natural sunlight, so
we're going to go ahead and raise it and just
| | 06:19 | focus it on the back of her head.
| | 06:20 | Now, because we used a screen instead of a
Soft Box, we can really make the light focus
| | 06:26 | in this area on her
shoulders and the back of her head.
| | 06:30 | Now, the nice thing about using a Back Light
is that you're going to get that little rim
| | 06:34 | of light that's going to make the key easier,
because it's going to differentiate and separate
| | 06:41 | her from the background.
| | 06:43 | So I want to work on that, and I'm not
as worried about the luminance level here.
| | 06:48 | As a matter of fact, this is going to be hotter
naturally, because I have a Grid on it instead of a Soft Box.
| | 06:56 | This is coming in at f11, and I'm going to
leave it that way because it's really not
| | 07:00 | affecting the lighting on her face,
and I'm going to just get a curl.
| | 07:03 | Once we start shooting, if I feel
that's a little hot, then I can dial it down.
| | 07:08 | So as see, using a Light Meter can be very
effective, because you know exactly what your
| | 07:13 | shot should look like before
you even snap your first picture.
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| Working with the camera histogram| 00:00 | Abba Shapiro: Now, if you don't have a Light Meter
you can actually just use the Camera and the
| | 00:05 | Histogram to make sure your lighting is right.
| | 00:07 | Now, I know we're pretty close, because we
did use the Light Meter earlier, but let's
| | 00:12 | go ahead and take a test shot and see
exactly how our lights are going to look.
| | 00:16 | Now I have this set up
for f8, 1/25th of a second.
| | 00:20 | I'm completely in manual mode, you don't want
to be in any kind of an automatic mode, because
| | 00:25 | it will try to compensate for your light.
| | 00:27 | So we set it up, so f8, 1/25th of a second, 100 ISO
is exactly what we want to use to light our model.
| | 00:35 | We'll take a quick test shot, and let's
take a look at that, that's pretty good.
| | 00:42 | Now, I have two things that I want to tell
you about that I don't want you to be alarmed.
| | 00:46 | First is a little piece of black
flashing right here on the side of her face.
| | 00:51 | I've Enabled a Highlight in my menu.
| | 00:53 | If I go there, there's something called the
Highlight alert, and that just tells me that
| | 00:57 | that part of the image is a little bit high.
| | 01:00 | Now, the other thing is I also have a red square in
my case turned on, and that tells me my focal point.
| | 01:06 | So right now, I'm focusing on her nose, I
really want to adjust that in the next shot,
| | 01:10 | but we'll worry about that later.
I wanted to just see if my light looks good.
| | 01:14 | In f8, she's lit well, but I think I want
to pop it a little bit more, so I have more
| | 01:19 | green to work with for when
we actually do the Chroma key.
| | 01:23 | So I'm going to open it up a stop, I'm going
to take it down to 7.1, and we'll take a look.
| | 01:31 | Now, this opened it up a little bit.
| | 01:32 | You notice I did move my focal point, and
if we look at the Histogram, we can see that
| | 01:37 | it's pretty balanced.
We know where it's dropping off.
| | 01:40 | It's dropping off in the background, so I
can open it up a little more, because I'm
| | 01:43 | really not blowing out our Highlights,
that's something that we can recover in the post.
| | 01:48 | So we can always bring that down.
| | 01:49 | Now you don't want to shoot too far to the
right, because you won't have any detail,
| | 01:53 | but if you're shooting Camera Raw, it gives
you a lot of flexibility in post to really
| | 01:57 | get the lighting in the image that you want.
| | 02:00 | Let's go ahead and open it
one more stop and take a look.
| | 02:08 | So here we are at 6.3, it's a
little bit more to the right.
| | 02:11 | I think the balance is good.
| | 02:13 | We can fix everything
else we want to do in post.
| | 02:14 | Now one of the things you may want to do is
actually turn off each of the lights and take a snap.
| | 02:20 | I like to do this whether I'm shooting green
screen or not, because it actually tells me
| | 02:23 | what each light is doing, and I
know that it's hitting the right spot.
| | 02:27 | So we'll just go ahead, and let's kill both
the Fill and the Back Light and see how it
| | 02:32 | looks with just the key.
| | 02:34 | With those lights turned off, let's go ahead and
take the shot and see what that one light is doing.
| | 02:40 | As you can see, that
light is doing a lot of work.
| | 02:42 | It's given me a nice key, and it's also
lighting up my background a little bit in conjunction
| | 02:47 | with some of those other lights I have.
| | 02:49 | Now let's go ahead and turn off our Key
Light and see what our Fill Light is doing.
| | 02:53 | So, with the Key Light turned off, we'll
go ahead, and we'll shoot with the Fill.
| | 02:59 | We can see that we're getting a little bit of Fill
here, and that's given me a much more dramatic lighting.
| | 03:07 | The final thing I want to see is I want to
see how that Hair Light or that Back Light
| | 03:11 | is working, so we're going to kill the two
front lights, the Fill and the Key and take
| | 03:14 | a look at just what the Back Light is doing.
| | 03:19 | As you can see, it's hitting the side of
her face, and I may tweak this a little bit.
| | 03:24 | I like the idea of that, but with my key
being so bright and my Back Light being so bright
| | 03:29 | on that side of her face, it's going to
blow it out a little bit more than I like.
| | 03:33 | So Rich, if you could, can we just position
that light so it's hitting her more from behind,
| | 03:38 | maybe move it a little bit to the right
and aim it a little bit more to her head.
| | 03:44 | As you can see, this is where the modeling
light comes in very helpful, because Rich
| | 03:48 | can actually see where the light is going, and I can
get a sense of what it is actually doing to the shot.
| | 03:54 | Let's go ahead and take
another snap and see how it looks.
| | 04:00 | So now, I can see exactly
what that Hair Light is doing.
| | 04:03 | So I can really control it.
| | 04:05 | So this is a really good method to make sure
your lights are doing exactly what you want
| | 04:09 | them to do and also take note of the
Histogram, and if you're blowing something out.
| | 04:14 | So once you have your lights set up in this
way, you can go ahead and start shooting.
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| Lighting the green screen| 00:00 | Abba Shapiro: So Rich, now that we have our lighting
set up for the model, could you talk a little
| | 00:05 | bit about lighting for
that green screen background?
| | 00:08 | Rich Harrington: Sure. The goal is we want
things as absolutely even as possible.
| | 00:11 | So Abba, I want you take a look through the
viewfinder and just sort of let me know what you're seeing.
| | 00:15 | Abba: So, to my eye it was perfectly smooth,
but once we actually look at the playback
| | 00:20 | in the histogram, and I can
see there are some darker spots.
| | 00:22 | Rich: Yeah, there is and so to adjust for
that, I'm going to make sure that I get the
| | 00:25 | angle right on the background, and I'm
going to adjust the intensity of the light.
| | 00:29 | Now, this particular light has a dial, so you see
there that we can go ahead and really ramp that up.
| | 00:35 | In this case, I'm going to take it all the
way up to 100% to get it as bright as possible,
| | 00:39 | and I might even swing this in.
| | 00:41 | So, let me know, am I on your
shot, Abba, if I move this in?
| | 00:43 | Abba: Let's take a look. Nope.
You're still good.
| | 00:46 | We're still pretty tight and even if you came in a
little bit, we can always crop that out in the post.
| | 00:51 | Rich: So the goal here is I want to get
the lights as close to the background and get
| | 00:55 | as much light back there as possible.
Let me just go tweak the other light quick.
| | 00:59 | Abba: Now, while he is doing that, one
thing to keep in mind, the reason the background
| | 01:02 | has to be lit so bright is because when the
strobes go off, that flash is a lot brighter
| | 01:08 | than these modeling lights.
| | 01:09 | So don't trust your eye, take
a shot and look at the camera.
| | 01:13 | Rich: So you see here, same idea.
I've put the light up to 100%.
| | 01:17 | I've got the maximum brightness.
| | 01:19 | Obviously, I could even use more
lights back here. It's up to you.
| | 01:23 | The goal is, is to get it as even as possible.
| | 01:25 | Now, since we are shooting stills and the
software has gotten so good, I don't need perfection.
| | 01:32 | You might have in your idea, in your perfect
brain that it's going to be an even key, zero
| | 01:36 | variation, zero shadows.
That's perfection and not reality.
| | 01:40 | I think we're getting pretty close,
particularly since we shooting Raw, it's going to be very
| | 01:44 | easy to pull this out when we jump into
the postproduction side with Photoshop.
| | 01:48 | So, I think we're pretty good.
Do I have any room to walk this one into?
| | 01:51 | Abba: Let's take a look.
| | 01:53 | Yeah, you have plenty of room,
because I'm fairly tight on her right now.
| | 01:57 | Okay, you're just right at the edge of my frame.
Let me go ahead and take a test shot.
| | 02:06 | That looks pretty even to me.
| | 02:08 | Rich: All right, great, so there you have it.
We've just tweaked the lights.
| | 02:12 | Remember, you can always do a garbage matte
if the lights end up in the edge of your shot
| | 02:17 | but they're not too close to the subject, you
just take the pen tool or a mask and knock them out.
| | 02:22 | You don't have to hide them from the scene.
| | 02:24 | It's more important to get a nice even green
background there, than it is to worry about
| | 02:28 | exactly where the lights are.
| | 02:30 | Just make sure that if your subject is
moving their hands that doesn't intersect with the
| | 02:34 | light, because then that kind of defeats the
purpose of shooting green screen to begin with.
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| Using constant lighting for photo and video| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: So, we just finished shooting strobes
for shooting still only work, and that went great.
| | 00:04 | What we want to do is actually switch over to just shooting
Constant Lighting for a moment, for video purposes.
| | 00:09 | Now, the reason why we've done
this is couple of things here.
| | 00:12 | I want to have good even light on the set,
and I want to be primarily shooting video,
| | 00:17 | but along the way I might grab some stills,
and the thing is, is that there's some major
| | 00:21 | drawbacks to using strobes as a constant light
source when it comes to the purposes of shooting video.
| | 00:27 | Abba Shapiro: Yeah, now, the purpose of using strobes is
simply you want bright light, and you want a freeze action.
| | 00:33 | Now, when you're shooting video, the
lights aren't as bright, and you have to realize
| | 00:38 | that modeling lights are a different color
temperature than these constant lights so
| | 00:42 | that you won't be balanced, and it will be
tougher to get the quality of image that you want.
| | 00:47 | And also, a lot of strobes have fans to keep
them cool, because they keep popping all the
| | 00:51 | time and keep getting hot and those fans
can be quite distracting and something you may
| | 00:56 | have to fix to in postproduction.
| | 00:57 | So, it's best when using Constant Lighting
to not mix them with them strobes and just
| | 01:02 | go from the beginning with standard lights.
Rich: So, that's what we've done here.
| | 01:07 | I've got several lights placed on set, and
some of them are so you could see us a little
| | 01:11 | bit better as we're
working, but it's really easy.
| | 01:13 | I've gone ahead, and we've placed four major lights,
and let's just talk about what's happening here.
| | 01:19 | Same lights here for our backdrops, but
we've switched out the type of backdrop.
| | 01:22 | We've gone to a larger green screen that's
going to be useful, and this is a fabric backdrop.
| | 01:27 | So, you've seen different types of backdrops
used throughout our exercises today, and we
| | 01:31 | did a quick overview at the top.
So, use whichever one you have.
| | 01:35 | Here we've just gone with a larger one that's
going to give us more flexibility when shooting video.
| | 01:39 | So, our two Back Lights are all the way up,
nice, bright, very, very intense, and this
| | 01:45 | is going to work well because it lets us get that really
even green in the background, and that's important.
| | 01:50 | Now, for our subject, we've
put two more lights in here.
| | 01:53 | We have two Kino Flos up towards the top and what
we're going to do is make a little bit of directionality.
| | 01:58 | Abba, would you mind toning down
the Fill Light just a little bit?
| | 02:03 | So take that all the way down for a second,
and you see that we have the same sort of issues.
| | 02:08 | We're trying to get a sense of directionality.
| | 02:10 | So, bring it up about halfway and
back down a little, and that's good.
| | 02:16 | I'm going to make sure conversely that our
other side here is up all the way. Notice our key.
| | 02:22 | So, you see just the fill there in action,
and I'm going to bring the key back up.
| | 02:27 | Abba, can you go ahead and kill that light?
There you go, and bring it back.
| | 02:33 | All right, so the Key and Fill are
working pretty well together there.
| | 02:37 | We've also got some Hair
Lights or Back Lights here.
| | 02:39 | We're only using one on our subject.
| | 02:41 | The other one is actually is just illumining the space,
so you could see the training exercise as it goes out.
| | 02:45 | We have a couple of other lights just so you
can actually see Abba and I as we're talking
| | 02:49 | to you. But pretty straightforward,
| | 02:51 | same core concepts of three point
lighting like you've seen before.
| | 02:54 | Remember the importance is a nice even
green backdrop and then attractive lighting that
| | 02:59 | helps the model standout
correctly or your interview subject.
| | 03:03 | Now, we're going to make a few more tweaks,
and we'll take a look at this through the
| | 03:06 | camera and see how it's coming together.
It's nice, Abba, a little bit more, good.
| | 03:16 | So, what we've done here is we've
actually popped up the waveform monitor.
| | 03:20 | This particular professional
video monitor has one built-in.
| | 03:23 | If you're not using a waveform for monitor
you can of course look at the Histogram and
| | 03:27 | Abba, tell them what they are seeing here.
| | 03:29 | Abba: Well, what's interesting here we're
actually seeing the green background, and
| | 03:32 | you see it's pretty evenly lit.
| | 03:33 | As a matter of fact, the only spot where it
kind of dips is where the model is blocking
| | 03:37 | the light a little bit, but that should be okay.
| | 03:40 | And then in this area here is our
model and she's nice in dead center.
| | 03:44 | So she's nice and evenly lit.
| | 03:46 | Rich: There we have it.
It looks like we got proper exposure.
| | 03:48 | We've got everything in place.
| | 03:49 | So, we're about ready to go
ahead and start shooting video.
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|
|
4. Working with the SubjectEstablishing the relationship| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: Obviously there's a lot of things
that are technical about it, but we're ready
| | 00:03 | to transition to actually working with our
subject, and Abba, I think one of the things
| | 00:07 | people get hung up on is there are so me technical
details that the people skills, the soft skills start to suffer.
| | 00:13 | Abba Shapiro: I mean, sometimes we get so wrapped
up in the technical part of it, it's when
| | 00:17 | we forget that we're dealing with people,
and we treat them like a prop, and they're
| | 00:21 | probably pretty nervous.
| | 00:22 | They're not use to working under lights, they're
not use to working with big strobe and flashes.
| | 00:28 | We have to remember that when you're doing
something that's technical, people still come first.
| | 00:32 | Rich: So, people have to remember, do a test
shoot, maybe bring in friend, give it a shot
| | 00:36 | ahead of time, and just a
couple of other things I recommend.
| | 00:39 | You have got people on set under bright lights,
you want to make sure they're comfortable.
| | 00:44 | Don't treat them like they're a hamburger at a fast food
restaurant, sitting there under warm lights, baking.
| | 00:49 | Creature comforts, water, if the
studio is cold offer a blanket or jacket.
| | 00:53 | If they're uncomfortable, make sure
you give them a place to sit down.
| | 00:57 | You're moving around, you get to use
your feet, and you're not standing still.
| | 01:01 | That subject may be just standing there for
hours on end, and you got to remember it.
| | 01:04 | They're not a C-stand.
Abba: Right, I mean talk to them.
| | 01:07 | Don't forget about them as a prop if you
ask them, "Do you need to take a break?
| | 01:11 | Do you need anything?"
| | 01:13 | Explain to them sometimes what you're doing
so that this mystical thing that's happening
| | 01:17 | around them, they kind of understand and they
feel part of the experience, and that's going
| | 01:21 | to work so much better for you.
| | 01:23 | Rich: To that end, that's why
I often like to shoot tethered.
| | 01:26 | I'll go ahead and have a large screen on set so I
could rotate it back and let them see what's happening.
| | 01:30 | I don't want them to focus too much on their
performance, but I want them to feel comfortable,
| | 01:34 | "Hey, what's happening on set?"
Or, "Let me see that."
| | 01:37 | I also give praise back for doing an interview
with lots of feedback, smiling, nodding, making
| | 01:42 | sure people feel comfortable.
| | 01:43 | Abba: You are hitting
that button right on the head.
| | 01:46 | We always forget sometimes, we're
so focus on, is this a good shot?
| | 01:50 | You look down at your camera,
and then you'll be like going, hmm.
| | 01:54 | They have no idea whether you like it,
whether you hate it, whether it was their fault, and
| | 01:57 | you maybe going, oh, I just need to open
it up a little bit or my shot was wrong.
| | 02:01 | They're thinking, oh, I did a bad performance.
| | 02:03 | So, you need to really
communicate with them that you like them.
| | 02:07 | You need to kind of embrace that conversation,
and then you're going to get people who are
| | 02:11 | less nervous, and you're going
to really get some great shots.
| | 02:13 | Rich: So, some very practical advice
there, remember, you're working with people.
| | 02:17 | Speaking as such, let's go ahead.
| | 02:20 | We're going to bring the model back in, and
we're going to start position her for the shots.
| | 02:23 | We've already done our test lighting, and
we're going to start to work on posing and
| | 02:26 | positioning to get great shots.
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| Positioning the subject| 00:00 | Abba Shapiro: In this movie we're going to talk
about positioning, where you're going to position
| | 00:03 | your model or your talent relative to your green
screen, your camera, and even vertically in the set.
| | 00:10 | Why don't you step on in and stand next to me?
| | 00:14 | Well, the first thing you realize when she stands
next to me is this ridiculous height difference.
| | 00:19 | So, if I was going to do a two shot here
you can see that I'm dramatically taller.
| | 00:24 | So, what we're going to have
you do is stand on this apple box.
| | 00:28 | Now if you're in a situation where you have
two people standing next to each other, you
| | 00:31 | can see it's a lot more natural.
| | 00:32 | So, if we were looking at each other we would
look like we'd be having a normal conversation
| | 00:36 | instead of me having to look down.
| | 00:38 | So, you have to take into account the
height of the people that you are shooting.
| | 00:42 | Now, another reason I'm going to put her on
an apple box is we're doing a sports shot,
| | 00:47 | and I want it to be a kind of a lot of power.
| | 00:49 | Usually, you want to be
below your talent to do that.
| | 00:53 | Since my camera is on sticks, and I won't
be walking around to shoot, I want to get
| | 00:57 | her elevated so that she is looking a
little bit down towards the lens and since we're
| | 01:02 | doing an athlete, it's going to
make them look a lot more powerful.
| | 01:05 | So, now that we've dealt with height,
what about the green screen and the camera?
| | 01:09 | Well, it's very important to have enough distance
between your talent and the green screen for two reasons.
| | 01:16 | First of all, you can get a lot of reflection
of the light that's bouncing off of the green
| | 01:20 | screen onto their shoulders.
| | 01:22 | Go ahead and step back close to that screen
and what you can see is that some of the light
| | 01:27 | that's reflecting off the screen is actually
hitting her face and making it green tinged.
| | 01:32 | If I try to do a key now,
I'd lose some of her face.
| | 01:36 | The other thing you notice if they're too
close to the green screen is her shadow.
| | 01:40 | That's going to change out the whole
balance that you worked so hard to get.
| | 01:43 | So, distance is good.
Go ahead and step back onto the apple box.
| | 01:47 | The last thing to keep in mind, the advantage
of having greater distance is that if you're
| | 01:52 | shooting with say, an f8 then you have a
limited depth of field, that's going to get a little
| | 01:56 | bit soft, and that's going to make creating
the key that much easier because the green's
| | 02:01 | going to be a lot smoother.
Now, where should we place our camera?
| | 02:06 | Depending on the type of shot you want
you're going to choose a specific lens whether you
| | 02:10 | want a wide or an ultra-wide or a telephoto.
| | 02:14 | Stylistically, I may do a wide shot at a low
angle but the problem here would be that with
| | 02:20 | a wide-angle lens I'm going to be picking up
all of my lights and the ceiling and possibly
| | 02:24 | her head would be above the green screen.
That's going to be a lot of cleanup work.
| | 02:29 | I find it that when I shoot green screen
that I like to move my camera far back and zoom
| | 02:34 | in because what happens is
the angle of view becomes less.
| | 02:39 | So now, I don't have to deal
with all of the stuff on the sides.
| | 02:42 | It also helps to drop my
depth of field by zooming in.
| | 02:45 | So, these are some things to keep in mind when
setting up your location and positioning your talent.
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| Posing techniques| 00:00 | Abba Shapiro: Now that we have everything set up,
our lights and our green screen, and we've
| | 00:05 | actually positioned our model exactly where
we want her to be, let's go ahead and take
| | 00:09 | some shots, and actually show you how we work
with posing the model and some of the things
| | 00:14 | that we might do when taking the shot.
| | 00:16 | Now, of course we won't have
her standing here so stiff.
| | 00:20 | So we're going to usually
you have a conversation.
| | 00:21 | Now, it's really good to speak with your model
or speak with your talent while you're taking
| | 00:26 | the picture, because they don't
know what's going on in your head.
| | 00:28 | You'll be looking down at your camera going, "This is really--"
and they're going, "They hate the way I'm doing it."
| | 00:33 | And you're going, "Wow, I
should have focused the camera."
| | 00:36 | So, remember to tell them what you're doing
and sometimes even let them see it so they
| | 00:41 | can see how they look because then they can
give you a slightly different look or appearance.
| | 00:46 | Let's go ahead and grab a couple of shots.
| | 00:49 | I'm going to go in tight here, and I want
to make sure that I focus right on the eye.
| | 00:53 | This is telling me how my lighting is, and
this is also telling me if my depth is good.
| | 00:59 | Now, if you notice I do have a little red square
right there that tells me that her eye is in focus.
| | 01:05 | So, while we do this, I'm
going to do some close-ups.
| | 01:07 | I'm actually framing you
from right below the neck.
| | 01:11 | So these are really tight shots.
| | 01:12 | I'm not sure exactly how we might use them,
but I want you to give me this athletic kind
| | 01:17 | of, almost a little bit angry of a look, okay?
| | 01:20 | The other thing that we did is I
wanted her to look like she was sweating.
| | 01:25 | To do this, water would evaporate very quickly,
so lip gloss with water on top and she just
| | 01:32 | used it in a little spray bottle, and
because of the lip gloss its actually going to keep
| | 01:37 | these little water droplets on her a lot longer.
| | 01:40 | With this all set, let's go
ahead and try a couple more shots.
| | 01:43 | Now, give me that really kind
of tough look, give me attitude.
| | 01:46 | Make sure my focal point is on the eye.
And let's take a look at that image.
| | 01:52 | Now, if you noticed she looks a lot better
when she's turning a little bit towards the
| | 01:57 | camera with some attitude than square.
| | 01:59 | Most people don't look
good square to the camera.
| | 02:02 | A little bit of turning is good.
| | 02:03 | This is really useful if you have somebody who
is, you know, you want to make look thinner.
| | 02:09 | A lot of times repositioning the way that
they stand can make them look a lot thinner.
| | 02:15 | Now, this isn't a problem we have with our
model, but I wanted her to look tough, I wanted
| | 02:20 | her to look forceful.
That shoulder actually does it.
| | 02:23 | I want to try both ways.
| | 02:24 | Let's go ahead, give me the left shoulder,
and then we'll turn and we'll do another
| | 02:28 | shot with the right shoulder. Okay and switch.
| | 02:38 | We can take a look at these two shots back
to back and what I'm looking at here is how
| | 02:42 | is the light playing with it.
| | 02:44 | Now, you'll notice in this wide shot that I
have my light here, and I'm not too worried
| | 02:49 | about it because I can crop that out.
| | 02:51 | This is a still image, but what I really
want to see is how the light is playing off her
| | 02:56 | face depending on which way she turns.
| | 02:58 | So, I can go back one, and I can see that
when she's facing our key light, her face
| | 03:04 | is a lot more lit, and I don't
want that. I like the drama.
| | 03:07 | So, we're going to go ahead, and
you're going to use your right shoulder.
| | 03:10 | You're going to lean in, you're going to
give me some attitude and then will go through
| | 03:13 | firing a few shots.
| | 03:15 | You can try giving me some different looks,
and if you feel that you want to add something
| | 03:18 | to it, we can go ahead and do that.
| | 03:23 | So, I have you framed up right
at about where the shorts end.
| | 03:29 | Your hand is in the shot.
Go ahead and feel free to use that.
| | 03:38 | Now what I'm going to do is because we're
doing a lot of vertical stuff, let me go ahead
| | 03:41 | and turn the camera on its side,
and we're going to shoot vertically.
| | 03:54 | Okay, take a rest for a second.
| | 03:57 | I turned this here to the side
because I was shooting vertically.
| | 04:01 | That caused a problem because my camera now
was lower even though it's on the same tripod.
| | 04:07 | If you noticed, I'm actually cutting her off
at the head that I now have more work to do.
| | 04:13 | So if I wanted to do this shot, it would
be important for me to do one of two things,
| | 04:17 | I either need to lower her down so that I
can tilt my camera down or in the case of
| | 04:23 | this background I might rotate it 90
degrees so that it's taller than it is wide.
| | 04:29 | Now, let's go ahead and add a prop.
| | 04:31 | I think what I like to work with is we have
a soccer ball, because she's a soccer player.
| | 04:36 | So Rich, let's go ahead and give her the
soccer ball, see how she can work with that, and
| | 04:40 | we'll take a few more shots.
| | 04:47 | It's a good thing to keep in mind,
especially when shooting stills, always shoot a little
| | 04:51 | bit wider than you think you need to be.
| | 04:55 | You can always crop something out but you can
never pull out wider if you didn't shoot it wider.
| | 05:00 | So, frame it the way you want it and then
either step back if you're using a prime lens
| | 05:04 | or zoom out a little bit.
| | 05:12 | Why don't you do one with the
ball, kind of pushed towards me?
| | 05:16 | Add a little more attitude with that shoulder.
| | 05:25 | Now, remember when you get very excited about
shooting you're starting to click away, stop
| | 05:30 | every few shots or every few minutes and make
sure that the light is right, and that you're
| | 05:35 | actually getting the shot that you want,
that you're getting the focus that you want.
| | 05:38 | So, always check playback.
| | 05:40 | It's one of the great
things about digital cameras.
| | 05:42 | One of the things I like to do after I get
the shot is I'll find the shot that I like,
| | 05:47 | and I can actually zoom in, and I
can verify that it is tack sharp.
| | 05:53 | That's important for me because when I composite this,
the sharper this is the better my image is going to look.
| | 06:00 | So, always check focus and always check to
make sure that you're getting what you want
| | 06:06 | and don't just keep shooting.
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| Shooting handheld| 00:00 | Abba Shapiro: Now, we're going to
take a look at shooting handheld.
| | 00:03 | Most of the time, if you're shooting a portrait
or school portraits or you have a lot of shots
| | 00:08 | to do, you just want people to step in and snap and
snap and snap and make sure the lighting doesn't change.
| | 00:14 | In this case, I really want a little
more freedom when working with the shot.
| | 00:18 | I may even change lenses so I don't
want to have to be tied down to a tripod.
| | 00:22 | So we're going to do some nice handheld shots.
| | 00:25 | You'll see that I'll get lower than the model to
really give a sense of strength to the athlete.
| | 00:30 | I may even switch to a much wider angle lens.
| | 00:33 | Now taking consideration when you are going
handheld, what's happening in the background
| | 00:38 | and always keep in the back of your mind that
if I position myself in a way that I'm actually
| | 00:44 | getting the light behind her head, I
won't be able to Chroma key it out.
| | 00:49 | So always keep in mind what's in your frame
and what the final shot is going to look like.
| | 00:54 | Rich Harrington: One of the things we did in this case
is we rotated the backdrop so it was taller.
| | 00:59 | This is going to give us a lot more
flexibility to shoot from lower angles shooting up because
| | 01:03 | we're going for that drama with sports
photography and so low angle is going to really work here.
| | 01:08 | And so, we just wanted some more freedom.
We didn't need that much side to side.
| | 01:11 | We just switched it, rotated it so it was taller, and
that's one of the advantages of having those backdrops.
| | 01:16 | They tend to be different widths
and heights so you have flexibility.
| | 01:19 | Abba: In this case, both Rich
and I are going to be shooting.
| | 01:22 | We'll be taking turns.
| | 01:24 | If you're going to be shooting multiple photographers
with a single model, make sure she knows it
| | 01:29 | so she knows who to listen to and which way
to look and always decide that ahead of time,
| | 01:34 | for instance, "Rich, you'll take three shots,
I'll take three shots, and we'll go back and forth."
| | 01:38 | Otherwise, for instance, we might both fire at the
same time and the model won't know where to look.
| | 01:44 | The strobes may not fire because
there's not enough refresh time.
| | 01:47 | So it's things that you want to keep in mind if you are
in a situation where you have multiple photographers.
| | 01:53 | So I'm going to start off
just do a handful of shots.
| | 01:55 | I'm going to shoot down a little bit lower
with a little bit of a longer lens and try
| | 01:59 | to get some really
impressive low-angle shots. Okay.
| | 02:05 | So I'm down, I am framed around your knees.
| | 02:07 | I really want you looking in
the camera for all of these.
| | 02:10 | I want this to be really intense.
I want you to be in my face. There we go.
| | 02:17 | Okay, you don't have to--yeah, there we go.
| | 02:20 | Push the ball towards me a little bit,
really angrily, like really at me. There we go.
| | 02:27 | Now I'm going to tighten up
and just frame up the ball.
| | 02:29 | This is going to give you a
really sense of a depth of field.
| | 02:32 | The ball is going to be a little bit out of
focus but you're going to be sharp as heck.
| | 02:37 | Okay, I'm going to pass it off to Rich,
and he's going to give you some guidance.
| | 02:41 | Rich: All right, so I'm going
to start just a little higher.
| | 02:44 | I'm shooting on a prime lens so I'm going
to get a little closer to you. Okay, good.
| | 02:50 | Right into that lens, that's great.
Good, can you give me a little smile?
| | 02:54 | Good, I'm just going to
come down a little bit lower.
| | 02:57 | I want you to hold the ball in front
of you and put it right towards my lens.
| | 03:03 | Good, I'm being careful not to overshoot from the top
of the background. This is great. No, you're fine.
| | 03:09 | Good, can you go ahead and
lean that shoulder in? Great.
| | 03:13 | Abba: Now, I shot everything I
wanted to do with my long lens.
| | 03:18 | I want to try something with an ultra wide.
| | 03:21 | I have an 11 to 22 actually a
10- to 22-millimeter lens on here.
| | 03:25 | So, that's going to give me a pretty wide angle.
| | 03:30 | Now if I shot this way, it actually is going
to make my athlete look smaller because the
| | 03:35 | wide angle lens is going to diminish them, and
I'm going to use the distortion to my advantage.
| | 03:40 | What I'm going to do is I'm going to get down.
| | 03:41 | I'm going I get down on my knees here, and I'm
going to shoot up with this really wide angle.
| | 03:45 | So the ball is going to dominate the scene and
the athlete is going to be towering above me.
| | 03:50 | Now if I shoot this way because I'm so wide,
I'm actually going to pick up a piece of the
| | 03:55 | ceiling, and that's not good.
| | 03:57 | Well, we're lucky because we had
put the model already on an apple box.
| | 04:01 | So in this case, I'm going to have her step
off the apple box, and then I can shoot my
| | 04:05 | shot, and I'll probably still
have the green screen above her head.
| | 04:08 | Let's go ahead and have you step back.
| | 04:10 | I'm going to move the apple boxes and have
you step back into the same position because
| | 04:15 | that's what we have you lit for.
| | 04:19 | Now, I'm going to feel like I'm really
close to you, but it's a really wide angle lens.
| | 04:26 | As a matter of fact, I'll show you what it looks,
like so you can have a sense of what's going on.
| | 04:31 | Let's take a couple of practice shots.
| | 04:38 | As you can see, the ball
really dominates the shot. Okay.
| | 04:44 | So it's a whole different vibe and a
whole different feel. Let's go ahead.
| | 04:47 | I'm going to take some shots, put the ball in
different positions, and we'll see what happens.
| | 04:59 | I like that, we're going
to get really, really close.
| | 05:01 | That ball is going to be right on top.
| | 05:05 | Now, one thing you may want to think
of is controlling your depth of field.
| | 05:12 | To control your depth of field, it's all
about either your focal length or your aperture.
| | 05:17 | Well, here's the challenge, I'm using a wide angle
lens so I have a pretty great depth of field.
| | 05:23 | But what I don't want to do is switch over
to aperture priority and change it to say
| | 05:28 | 2.8 because it's going to blow everything out.
| | 05:30 | What I'm going to need to do is either
lower my lights which is a lot of work because I
| | 05:36 | have to get everything perfect again, or I can
cut the amount of light that goes into the camera.
| | 05:42 | I can do that by getting a neutral
density filter and screwing it on.
| | 05:46 | Now less light is going to get to my camera, and I'm going
to be able to shoot at a much more wide-open setting.
| | 05:53 | So as you can see, there are a lot of things to consider
when shooting handheld and green screen at the same time.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Recapping strobe photography| 00:00 | Abba Shapiro: Now, we've covered
a lot in the last few movies.
| | 00:03 | I just want to go over some of the basic camera
settings once again just so you can feel comfortable with it.
| | 00:10 | You might be used to the Golden Triangle when
shooting, which is aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.
| | 00:16 | And as you change one, it affects all the
others, and that's how you control your depth
| | 00:21 | of field and the way that your shot looks.
| | 00:23 | Well, when shooting with strobes,
it's again a little bit different.
| | 00:27 | You really always want to shoot in manual,
and you want to keep your shutter speed at
| | 00:32 | what's best for that camera.
| | 00:33 | In my case, with a Canon,
it's 1/125th of a second.
| | 00:38 | The other thing you want to do is you want
to set your lights using a light meter or
| | 00:42 | if you don't have a light meter, use the
histogram like we showed you before so that they're
| | 00:47 | fixed at a certain luminance level.
| | 00:50 | So speed and luminance are fixed, and
you're shooting in completely manual.
| | 00:54 | If you start switching over to say,
aperture priority, you're going to notice that your
| | 01:00 | shots are over or underexposed because
you've really designed it for manual.
| | 01:04 | But the only thing you can change is ISO and
normally your lights are bright enough that
| | 01:10 | you want to shoot as slow as possible, which
would be 100 or 200 depending on your camera.
| | 01:16 | Now, one thing you can control is the depth
of field, and you can do this a couple of ways.
| | 01:23 | You can change the focal length and the longer the
focal length the more shallow the depth of field.
| | 01:30 | You can also change it by controlling
how bright or how dim the lights are.
| | 01:35 | So if, for instance, you want a lot of depth
of field, and you want to make sure that your
| | 01:39 | talent is always in focus, you'll
probably want to shoot at say F8 or F11.
| | 01:45 | But if you want to really have a shallow
depth of field, what you're going to have to do
| | 01:50 | is turn the luminance values of the lights
when they pop so that you're getting at say 2.8.
| | 01:56 | Now, you can go around and do that with all
your lights or the other option is to block
| | 02:02 | the light that goes into the camera, and
you can just simply screw on a neutral density
| | 02:06 | filter and they come in a variety of densities to really
cut the amount of light that goes into your camera lens.
| | 02:14 | Now, with focal length, remember when
shooting green screen that the further back you are
| | 02:20 | the narrower the angle of view is which
means if you have a lot of lights that are close
| | 02:27 | in, I should stand really far back.
And that way, I won't see the lights in my shot.
| | 02:32 | If I come in really close with a wide-angle
lens, I'm probably going to pick up a lot
| | 02:36 | of background, and it's very possible that
my talent is going to be outside the frame
| | 02:40 | of my green screen which
defeats the entire purpose.
| | 02:45 | Also keep in mind some of the
traditional photography rules.
| | 02:48 | With a long lens or if you're actually a long focal
length, you're going to be flattening a person's face.
| | 02:55 | Well, up to a point, that's good because
it actually makes the features look nice but
| | 02:59 | if you go too long, it doesn't look natural.
And on the flip side when shooting wide or
| | 03:05 | ultra wide, you're going
to be distorting the person.
| | 03:08 | So make sure that if you're using an ultra wide-angle
lens, that's the look that you're striving for.
| | 03:13 | Lastly, remember there is refresh time.
| | 03:17 | Every different brand of
light works differently.
| | 03:21 | Some you can use, and you can shoot constantly.
| | 03:23 | Snap, snap, snap, snap and
they'll pop every single time.
| | 03:28 | On some of the lower end units, you may
need to wait a third of a second or a half of a
| | 03:32 | second until they're ready to pop again,
and if you keep clicking, your first shot may
| | 03:37 | look great but the next two shots might be dark.
| | 03:41 | So always keep in mind the
refresh time of your lights.
| | 03:44 | Finally, check your camera and make sure
you're actually getting the shots you think you're
| | 03:49 | getting and they're in focus by
playing it back and zooming in.
| | 03:54 | Just remember shooting green screen is a lot
of the same techniques that you would normally
| | 03:59 | shoot but you got to take a
couple things more into consideration.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Best Shooting Practices for DSLR VideoShooting video with a DSLR| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: We're just about
to set for rolling video.
| | 00:02 | I want to go through some practical advice
on getting things set up, and Abba is going
| | 00:06 | to be a second set of eyes for
me just looking at the monitor.
| | 00:08 | It's always good if you have an
opportunity for a second opinion.
| | 00:11 | Typically if I'm on set, I'll be working with
the director of photography, if I'm directing
| | 00:15 | or vice-versa, we'll just have a conversation
to make sure we feel like everything is working.
| | 00:20 | Okay, so here we go.
I've got the camera.
| | 00:22 | I want to talk a little bit about the settings
that matter most in this camera and for video,
| | 00:27 | there's this concept
called the Exposure Triangle.
| | 00:29 | Now, I'm going to go ahead and switch over here
and check a couple of things in the menu first off.
| | 00:34 | Now I'll call these settings out, and I am
shooting in manual mode as opposed to aperture
| | 00:39 | priority or shutter priority.
| | 00:41 | The reason why for manual mode is you want total
control, you don't want things changing in the shot.
| | 00:47 | As she would turn from side to side,
the lighting is actually adjusting.
| | 00:51 | Go ahead and rotate back and the
histogram is changing there on the monitor.
| | 00:55 | The reason why is that as she moves,
the light is reflecting differently.
| | 00:59 | So, if the camera was in an auto mode, it's
going to be like a roller coaster going up
| | 01:03 | and down and making changes and side to side,
not with physical movement but with just the
| | 01:08 | exposure, and that's just not going to work, and we
definitely don't want the shutter changing either.
| | 01:13 | So we have to go to total manual control.
| | 01:16 | Now, once I'm in manual there,
it's pretty straightforward.
| | 01:19 | The next thing I'm going to decide
on is going to be my shutter speed.
| | 01:23 | Now, this is all going to be
dependent upon on the frame rate you're using.
| | 01:26 | So I'll just tap over here to my Video Quality
Settings, and Abba, what are the settings that
| | 01:31 | we decided to use for this project for video?
What did the client want?
| | 01:34 | Abba Shapiro: The client wanted 24 frames per second
because they wanted that film look and 1920x1080
| | 01:40 | because we're going to be doing high def.
So I think you're in a good space right there.
| | 01:44 | Rich: Okay, great, so
I'll go ahead and change that.
| | 01:46 | That's good and while we're here, we're
going to deal with the fact of the microphone.
| | 01:51 | Now, for beginning, we're just going to be
shooting video without audio but I still want
| | 01:55 | to get some reference, so I'll go with the
manual sensitivity here, and I think I'm in
| | 02:00 | good shape there so I'll just pop out.
| | 02:01 | Abba: Now, one thing to keep in mind is
you wanted to do your audio in manual, because
| | 02:06 | if you leave it on auto gain, if there's any
silence, the microphone is going to look for
| | 02:11 | a sound and what it's going to do it's going
to immediately goose up the audio, and then
| | 02:16 | you're going to hear this room tone and then
people start talking and they'll drop down again.
| | 02:20 | So if you don't want that up and down, and
that's going to be extremely distracting,
| | 02:23 | and you don't want to have to fix that in
post go to a manual setting for your audio gain.
| | 02:28 | Rich: In fact, one of the things we're
going to go do is actually go to a SyncSound
| | 02:31 | work flow a little bit later.
| | 02:33 | Although that's beyond the scope of today's exercise,
but you're welcome to check out here on lynda.com.
| | 02:37 | We actually have a class that I do with
Robbie Carman, and we do explore SyncSound in there,
| | 02:41 | so check that out to go a little bit deeper.
But this is pretty straightforward.
| | 02:45 | So I've got my shutter speed
determined for me essentially by the frame rate.
| | 02:50 | The general rule is take your frame rate,
multiply by two and put a one on top, and
| | 02:54 | that's going to give you
the natural shutter speed.
| | 02:56 | Now you might change this for a stylized look
or technical necessity but in general speaking,
| | 03:01 | I'm going to keep that where it needs to be.
| | 03:04 | So if I am at 24, that would be 24 times 2,
and that would essentially be 1/48th.
| | 03:09 | Except, that's not a choice.
| | 03:11 | So, I'm going to go ahead and adjust my shutter speed
there to a 1/50th, 1/100th, 1/80th, 1/60th, 1/50th.
| | 03:22 | Now, in brightening that up, I'm actually a
bit overexposed, and we have to compensate.
| | 03:28 | So when you change shutter speed you have to
go to the other side of the Exposure Triangle.
| | 03:33 | You really have two other choices at this point,
aperture or the ability to go ahead and change the ISO.
| | 03:38 | Abba, can you go ahead and get people
just a short explanation of ISO?
| | 03:42 | Abba: Sure. ISO is film speed.
| | 03:45 | In the old days--if you were shooting in the
old days--it would be how fast or how sensitive
| | 03:50 | your film is and the way they would make
film more sensitive is to make bigger grains.
| | 03:55 | So, here we are digital.
| | 03:57 | So as we need more speed, a more sensitive
camera would increase the ISO from 100 to
| | 04:04 | 200 to 400 and some of these
cameras can go all the way up to 6400.
| | 04:09 | The point is you give
something up when you do that.
| | 04:12 | It becomes noisier.
You see a lot more speckles.
| | 04:15 | So you want to be careful that if you're
going to crank up your ISO, then you're not going
| | 04:20 | to compromise your image quality because
it's going to make the key a lot more difficult.
| | 04:24 | Rich: I'm kind of leaning there
between 500 and 640, what do you think?
| | 04:28 | Abba: I like a little
bit darker. I like the 500.
| | 04:31 | It gives me a little bit more
drama there than being fully bright.
| | 04:35 | Rich: So a little bit of richness in the blacks?
| | 04:36 | Abba: Yeah, I think sometimes when we
make it too bright, the blacks aren't as deep,
| | 04:40 | and it doesn't look as dramatic.
| | 04:42 | Rich: Remember, it's always easier to lift a
shot than it is to recover an overexposed shot.
| | 04:48 | Now the important thing here is that we
have nice brightness in that background so it's
| | 04:51 | going to key really easily.
| | 04:52 | We have a little bit of a hotspot here but
I don't see anything that concerns me for
| | 04:55 | pulling off a good key.
| | 04:57 | Our last choice is changing the aperture,
and we've already discussed aperture in depth
| | 05:01 | when we talked about still
photography workflow. Same thing here.
| | 05:04 | Now obviously, if you're not shooting on a
DSLR, you might not have an aperture setting.
| | 05:09 | But the general idea is that the small number the
bigger the opening, which means more light coming in.
| | 05:14 | Now the challenge here is don't just go down
to 1.8 because you can with your prime lens,
| | 05:19 | because what's going to happen is as the
model moves in and out or your subject, they can
| | 05:23 | easily fall out of focus.
| | 05:25 | There's one thing that I know about HD videos,
most people don't like it when it looks blurry,
| | 05:30 | and you didn't intend it that way.
| | 05:31 | Abba: Yeah, having a shallow depth of
field is very, very dangerous because you can't
| | 05:36 | go back and say, "Oh, we'll use a different
photograph because you're using an entire shot."
| | 05:42 | So you want to have a pretty good depth of
field because people get excited and they'll
| | 05:45 | lean in and they'll lean back, and if you
have a really shallow depth of field, they
| | 05:50 | are going to go out of focus.
Rich: So I think we're pretty good here at F4.
| | 05:54 | So I'm happy with that, and I could
go ahead and of course adjust that.
| | 05:57 | But notice, as I change my F-stop, this is where
I'd have to go back and change the ISO to compensate.
| | 06:03 | So this is why we refer to it as a triangle.
| | 06:06 | So I'm going to leave the shutter speed locked,
I'm going to take the F-stop back to 4.5 and
| | 06:12 | then pull the ISO back down
and right above there, right?
| | 06:17 | Abba: That looks great.
| | 06:18 | Rich: Okay, so we have an even key
here nice good green, well-exposed subject,
| | 06:23 | next thing you do is properly check our focus.
| | 06:27 | So one of the things I like to do is I'm
going to use this zoom button here, and I'm just
| | 06:31 | going to digitally zoom in.
Now, it's going to get soft when you do this.
| | 06:37 | But essentially, what you want to
do is find a good point for focus.
| | 06:40 | I usually recommend an eyelash and keep in mind we
are zoomed in so it's never going to get tack sharp.
| | 06:49 | I'll go ahead and zoom back out just a little.
That's looking pretty good.
| | 06:53 | Do you buy the focus?
Abba: I think it's pretty good.
| | 06:56 | Now, you made a point that
you're doing a digital zoom in.
| | 06:59 | You're not doing a manual zoom in
because that actually could change things.
| | 07:03 | Rich: Yeah, you're right, Abba.
| | 07:04 | When we change the zoom, what often changes is
the F-stop especially on less expensive lenses.
| | 07:09 | Now fortunately, I don't have that problem
with this lens although I got in trouble when
| | 07:12 | I bought this lens because it was so expensive.
| | 07:15 | But that's one of the benefits of some of these
lenses that the F-stop doesn't change when you zoom.
| | 07:19 | But this is not a zoom in for anything real.
| | 07:21 | So those of you used to shooting a video, you zoom
the camera, and you check focus, you zoom back out.
| | 07:25 | Don't do that. Just punch in here on the button,
and then you just go ahead and pull right back out
| | 07:30 | and just tilt down and recompose your shot.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The sync sound workflow| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: So, let's just talk about the
basics here before we roll some audio.
| | 00:03 | We're not going to go too deep but
a couple of key things to realize.
| | 00:06 | First off, I've attached a reference mic here.
This is going to be great.
| | 00:10 | You see that we've got a little
road mic here on the top of the camera.
| | 00:13 | It's running into the base of the camera.
That's going to give me better audio.
| | 00:16 | Now, I'm going to go ahead and switch over to
my menus here and just check the sensitivity.
| | 00:20 | I want to make sure that the microphone is
actually on and could you just tell me about
| | 00:25 | your drive over today?
Just tell me what the traffic looks like?
| | 00:27 | female speaker: It wasn't that I
drive off after rush hour or so.
| | 00:31 | Rich: And did you see you anything
interesting today on the train or on the traffic?
| | 00:34 | female speaker: A lot of down trees
from the last night's storm.
| | 00:37 | Rich: So you notice there, I had the
punch up the sensitivity of the mic.
| | 00:40 | My voice is a lot louder because this mic
is close to me, but I needed a good reference
| | 00:44 | source to get her audio.
| | 00:46 | And this is just going to give better
audio to the camera so I can queue up my manual
| | 00:50 | audio that we record separately
typically called SyncSound.
| | 00:55 | And that SyncSound is going to be recorded
in just a second on a different source and
| | 00:58 | she's wearing a microphone much closer.
| | 01:00 | Generally speaking, you want a
mic to be about this far away.
| | 01:03 | Now Abba, how do we go ahead
and sync up those two sources?
| | 01:07 | Abba Shapiro: Well, there is a great little device
or a great little application that you can
| | 01:11 | download to say an iPhone or an iPad or an
Android, and it's basically like a film slate
| | 01:17 | with a lot more detail, and it's a great way
to match your audio with your video source.
| | 01:23 | Rich: So, go ahead and open up that
slate and show them what it looks like.
| | 01:26 | Abba: So this is the basic
information that we've entered.
| | 01:29 | And now as soon as we open up the slate,
and when we're ready to roll, and we know that
| | 01:34 | everything is speeding as they
say, we can just simply hit start.
| | 01:39 | Rich: And that obviously runs through,
gives a sync point, both the flash and sound.
| | 01:46 | That's going to make it really
easy to queue up the two points.
| | 01:48 | Now, there's a whole bunch of training here
on DSLR Training and Video Production Training
| | 01:52 | on lynda.com so I don't want to go any deeper.
| | 01:54 | By this time, we want you to go, "Well,
what's all that gear they're using? What's that?"
| | 01:58 | This is just the basics, external
microphone, a slate to sync the source.
| | 02:03 | You can use your hands, you can
use a clapboard, I don't care.
| | 02:06 | Just have something that produces an audio point
that's going to be on this camera and on her microphone.
| | 02:11 | And we've hooked up a dedicated microphone to her
that's running into a Zoom H4N for audio recording.
| | 02:17 | So, we're just about set.
| | 02:18 | And when we come back, we're going to
take a look at interview techniques.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Interview techniques| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: All right, we're ready for the
interview and one of the things that I want to point
| | 00:03 | out is that I'm not
actually going to do the interview.
| | 00:05 | I'll give you some advice.
| | 00:07 | But generally speaking, if you're shooting
the interview and trying to do the interview
| | 00:11 | you're going to run into a problem.
It's going to go like this, okay.
| | 00:16 | So what do you think about--
and really that just doesn't work.
| | 00:22 | The problem here is that you're talking
to the camera, and you have no eye contact.
| | 00:26 | So you really have two choices.
| | 00:28 | You either need to get out from behind the
camera and just lock it all down and let it
| | 00:32 | run or put a person to the side like in
this case, Abba is going to do the interview in
| | 00:36 | a second and he's got proper eye line with her.
So we've gone ahead and adjust it.
| | 00:40 | So Abba, go ahead and look towards our subject.
| | 00:43 | They're at the same height so we've got good
eye line and they're looking towards each other,
| | 00:47 | and that's important, because what we don't want
is her looking up or down during the interview.
| | 00:51 | We want her to be pretty
much level with the camera.
| | 00:54 | So we've got a nice plane here.
| | 00:56 | Abba's eye line, her eye line, and the
camera's eye line are all pretty much equal.
| | 01:00 | Now beyond this we're going to go ahead now
and start to roll the camera and make sure
| | 01:04 | everything is up to speed, and we'll use the
sync source to go ahead and jam sync the DSLR
| | 01:11 | to the audio down there.
| | 01:13 | Then in post-production we could
pull those two pieces together.
| | 01:16 | All right, so Abba, I am about
to set here. Are you all ready?
| | 01:21 | Abba Shapiro: Mm-hmm.
| | 01:22 | Rich: Okay, great. John,
would you mind coming in?
| | 01:28 | I've asked an assistant
just to help with the audio.
| | 01:31 | He's going to go ahead and record.
| | 01:32 | Normally speaking, it wouldn't be a bad idea
for him to have headphones on in monitoring.
| | 01:37 | We are just doing this not for a real
interview, but just to show the shooting practices.
| | 01:41 | But if you are doing real audio, go ahead
and put headphones on and make sure you're
| | 01:45 | properly monitoring what's going into play.
I'm going to ahead and record.
| | 01:51 | Let me know when you're
recording, John.
| | 01:54 | John: Recording.
Rich: Great, and place the slate marker.
| | 02:06 | Now the challenge there--I'm going to make
him do the marker again--is he didn't
| | 02:08 | give us any audio slate.
| | 02:10 | So while we have a beep, the audio that we're
getting on the zoom that's recorded, we don't
| | 02:15 | have anything to reference it up to.
| | 02:17 | So the slate has number and information
on it, but he didn't call anything out.
| | 02:21 | He needs to read the major contents of that slate so we
know that the audio file matches up with the number.
| | 02:28 | So hold up the slate for me one more time,
and in this case here we're doing SyncSound,
| | 02:33 | and this is labeled as Scene 2.3, Take 1.
| | 02:36 | I'm going to go ahead and stop
recording, and I'll hit record again.
| | 02:42 | Okay, I'm rolling, you're set?
John: SyncSound, Scene 2-3, Take 1 marker.
| | 02:53 | Rich: Great, clear the frame.
| | 02:57 | Check my composition, make sure we're
in good shape, and I'm all locked down.
| | 03:02 | I want to minimize any movement.
| | 03:03 | I don't want to have a bunch of panning
while I'm keying, because technically speaking if
| | 03:08 | she was moving around in the frame, the background
should probably move with her unless she's walking through.
| | 03:13 | So you want to get a nice stable shot.
| | 03:14 | All right Abba, why don't you
go ahead and start the interview?
| | 03:17 | Abba: Okay, we're going to
just basically have a conversation.
| | 03:21 | And don't worry about anybody else in the room.
You don't have to address the camera.
| | 03:25 | You don't have to be polite
and talk to all the other folks.
| | 03:29 | It's just you and me having our conversation.
| | 03:31 | So don't worry about your eyes darting around.
female speaker: Okay.
| | 03:33 | Abba: I'm going to ask you a question, and
when you answer me, you can answer with my
| | 03:39 | question as part of your answer, but I'm
not looking for just like yes or no answers.
| | 03:46 | If we need to stop, we need to stop.
But ultimately, we're just talking.
| | 03:50 | So for instance, let's talk about today's shoot.
It was kind of unique. It was a green screen.
| | 03:54 | Have you ever worked on a
set doing a green screen shoot?
| | 03:57 | female speaker: No, I have never used the green screen.
Abba: What do you feel like?
| | 04:01 | What was kind of new?
Did you learn something interesting?
| | 04:03 | female speaker: Oh, I learned a lot today.
| | 04:05 | If the lights are too bright or if I'm too close
to it, and there's green on my face, I can see it.
| | 04:12 | I thought that that was really cool.
| | 04:15 | I've never had to fake like I'm
in a situation not for shooting.
| | 04:20 | I've never had to do that.
| | 04:21 | I've never had to imagine that I'm
say head butting a ball, for example.
| | 04:24 | I've never done anything like those.
| | 04:28 | Abba: So yeah, you get to see what the
other side is like with all these special effect
| | 04:32 | movies where they're acting to nothing
and having to do it over and over again.
| | 04:37 | female speaker: It gives me a lot of respect for actors.
| | 04:40 | Abba: You did a lot of
standing around today.
| | 04:43 | female speaker: I did. I'm used to that.
| | 04:45 | Abba: Was it any easier or harder
today because of what we made you wear?
| | 04:48 | female speaker: Honestly, I would say easier.
Athletic wear is pretty comfortable.
| | 04:52 | Abba: And tell me about the shoes.
| | 04:54 | female speaker: I've never worn cleats in my life.
My only sport in high school was cross-country.
| | 05:01 | Rich: So, Abba did a great job
there of establishing rapport.
| | 05:04 | He also did follow up questions to
make sure our subject state engaged.
| | 05:08 | Remember, you're going to edit the interview.
You'll take things out.
| | 05:12 | One of the things I like to
point out to our subject is relax.
| | 05:16 | You're going to say some things, if
you want to say it again, that's fine.
| | 05:19 | I might ask you a question more than once.
| | 05:21 | It's just because we just want
to keep talking about some things.
| | 05:24 | When your subject knows that chances are
you're only going to be using 10% or 20% of what
| | 05:28 | they say, they'll relax, because
they'll realize they don't have to be perfect.
| | 05:32 | The big thing is just keep it conversational.
| | 05:35 | Now this is not a class
about interview techniques.
| | 05:37 | I promise we'll go deeper
on that topic in the future.
| | 05:40 | But really straightforward here, the
importance is just how you're pulling this off.
| | 05:44 | Now one of the things I would do right
away before I did the rest of the interview is
| | 05:48 | immediately pop this card out of
the camera and check it on a laptop.
| | 05:53 | I would make sure that before I shot hours of
green screen footage, I could actually key it easily.
| | 05:58 | This is a piece of cake.
| | 05:59 | Just pop the card out, open it up into your favorite
NLE or motion graphics or compositing tool and check it.
| | 06:05 | Make sure that the shot actually works, and
that you're not making more work for yourself.
| | 06:09 | It's far better to spot a problem early and
have to re-do a couple of questions than it
| | 06:14 | is to have to start all over or
come back again on another day.
| | 06:18 | So really good stuff here.
I think we've got a couple things.
| | 06:20 | Abba, do you have any parting advice for
interview techniques that you like to share?
| | 06:24 | Abba: One of the key things to keep in mind is
don't step on the other person when they're speaking.
| | 06:29 | Naturally, when we're having a conversation, you do want
to say uh-huh, yeah, so they know that you're listening.
| | 06:35 | But in this case, it could
really mess up the audio.
| | 06:38 | So simple nods and really do pay attention
to them, because if you ask a question, and
| | 06:43 | then you're looking down to your notes they're
talking to the top of your head and they'll get bored.
| | 06:48 | So it's really keeping them engaged.
| | 06:50 | It's really keeping the eye to eye contact,
and you just want to make sure that unlike
| | 06:54 | a natural conversation, you don't step on
each other's words that they wait long enough
| | 06:59 | after your question to start their answer, and
you don't stop them in the middle so it's abrupt.
| | 07:06 | Rich: So there you have it.
| | 07:07 | I think you got a pretty good idea, and
you can get out there and start running.
| | 07:11 | You'll notice that there are a lot of similarities
between what you'll learn for photography and video.
| | 07:15 | Same idea of getting proper separation from
your background, making sure that your subject
| | 07:19 | is lit, and that's generally independent
with the background lighting and then just focus
| | 07:24 | on the quality of the performance.
| | 07:26 | Truly engage that subject and don't get so
hung up on the fact that you might be nervous,
| | 07:30 | because you're doing a green screen shoot or so
preoccupied with what's the next question I'm going to ask.
| | 07:36 | When you're having fun and they're having
fun, you're going to get better performance
| | 07:39 | and better all around video acquired.
| | 07:41 | I think that looks great, and we're just about ready to
head on in and start to do the postproduction process.
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|
|
6. Background SelectionWhat makes a good background?| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: Now that we have our images
organized, it's time to get ready for the compositing
| | 00:04 | tasks, and I think one of the first things
before we even start to composite, you got
| | 00:08 | to know what's going to go behind your subject
before you start to really relight or color grade.
| | 00:14 | Abba Shapiro: I mean, there are a lot of
great things you can put behind you.
| | 00:16 | You can put like we could be in the Arctic.
Rich: Or the desert.
| | 00:21 | Abba: Or we could be underwater swimming or--
| | 00:24 | Rich: Or my son's favorite
one, look, I'm on the moon.
| | 00:26 | Abba: But seriously, we know that there's
all these wild crazy backgrounds but what we want
| | 00:31 | to do is we want to give it a natural look.
Rich: Yeah, photorealistic.
| | 00:34 | Abba: We want to make sure that it
doesn't really look like a Chroma key.
| | 00:39 | It just looks comfortable.
| | 00:40 | Rich: Yeah, there's lots of
examples of bad Chroma key out there.
| | 00:44 | We're going to pick some
backdrops that are nice and natural.
| | 00:47 | We can go some urban, some gritty,
and maybe play with some stadium shots.
| | 00:51 | There are lots of options to try out.
| | 00:53 | So we're going to jump in and just make some
general advice on what we're looking for when
| | 00:57 | it comes to picking a background.
| | 00:59 | Then I'm going to show you some very
specific techniques using Adobe Photoshop and Depth
| | 01:03 | Mattes so you can adjust the depth of field
during post-production if you didn't shoot
| | 01:07 | it right to begin with.
| | 01:09 | We've gathered a collection of potential background
plates here, and we'll use some of these in our projects.
| | 01:13 | But we got a lot of different options here.
We must start with some of these, Abba.
| | 01:17 | These are some that you picked.
| | 01:19 | What is it that you like about these as
potential candidates for use as backgrounds?
| | 01:23 | What stands out to you?
| | 01:24 | Abba: Well, when I try to pick a background
I want something that's interesting yet not
| | 01:28 | overpowering and also that can look
natural when I place the person in the shot.
| | 01:34 | So I keep in mind things like perspective
and color, and that it's not too noisy.
| | 01:39 | For instance, there are not a lot of people
in this shot so it's not going to distract.
| | 01:44 | So I try to find a background that
I think will meld with the subject.
| | 01:48 | Rich: That's the same sort of thing here.
| | 01:50 | This is where it actually started
and then this is where you took it.
| | 01:54 | So we had the ability of course in post-processing
to easily remove a few things like trashcans
| | 01:59 | here or stray people. That's simple.
| | 02:01 | Now how about some of
these here with the bridges?
| | 02:03 | You've got three different
potential candidates here with the sunset.
| | 02:07 | All of them are shot raw so
we've got a lot of flexibility there.
| | 02:10 | What do you like about some of these?
I know which one I would pick actually.
| | 02:13 | Abba: Well, they have different depths of fields
so that's going to help me give it a different look.
| | 02:18 | Once I clean it up with the Camera Raw,
I can remove some of the highlights.
| | 02:22 | So it doesn't look as blown out.
| | 02:24 | So I just like the variety, and I'll probably try
different ones just to see how it complements the talent.
| | 02:29 | Now you said you already have one you like.
I'm curious which one of them might be?
| | 02:32 | Rich: I like this one here, because the
foreground elements are the shallowest depth of field.
| | 02:36 | I like that the focus point is that we actually
have blurring happening for the stuff that's close.
| | 02:42 | So, the things that we normally be in the
composite midfield that this tree and other
| | 02:47 | things aren't going to be
competing with our subject.
| | 02:49 | I'm okay that the area falls off.
| | 02:51 | Plus, I like the directionality here that
we have a little bit of a sense of an angle
| | 02:55 | that's going to put some dynamics in there,
which is the same reason why I like this series,
| | 02:59 | and we'll actually process this image a
little bit later, but you definitely have a sense
| | 03:03 | of dynamic here with a strong clean line and
perspective will make that green screen shot feel less flat.
| | 03:09 | Abba: Yeah, and I think that's something
that we need to keep in mind that the same
| | 03:13 | rules that apply to traditional photography,
having nice angles, nice lines apply to your background.
| | 03:19 | The background isn't just
something to throw there.
| | 03:21 | It should be a nice shot in itself.
Rich: Let's take a look.
| | 03:24 | I did a few pics as well for
some of the motion compositing.
| | 03:27 | I just want to talk about some of the ones
that I selected, and we'll come in here and
| | 03:32 | take a look at these stills.
| | 03:34 | I went a little bit different here
knowing that I'd have some post-processing.
| | 03:37 | So I have three textures that are very simple
head-on textures, a brick wall, a wooden door,
| | 03:43 | and a metal door, and I'm going to take
advantage of post-processing to create the sense of
| | 03:47 | angles on those, but I just went with
things that all felt about the right size.
| | 03:52 | When I shot these, I was thinking about the
distance for the subject from the background.
| | 03:57 | And we'll talk more about
production in the second.
| | 04:00 | Also for me, everyone loves a good sky and
one of the weakest things about video interviews
| | 04:04 | is trying to get great-looking skies, because you're
always exposing for the subject and not the backdrop.
| | 04:10 | Abba: Yeah, as a matter of fact, it looks more real
when you fake it than when you try to do it for real.
| | 04:15 | Rich: Yeah, so we've got a great sunset here
and a nice dramatic HDR shot, and then I also
| | 04:20 | went with another one here that had a lot
of details with some harsh lighting in it
| | 04:24 | that I'm going to recreate digitally.
| | 04:26 | So sometimes I look for a sense of lighting
in these images, and you'll actually see that
| | 04:31 | that this image, the red brick, and the door,
and even the brick wall to a certain extent
| | 04:36 | have a sense of directionality
to the light in the scene.
| | 04:38 | I made sure that it wasn't a flat image.
| | 04:40 | I like the fact that there
was some lighting already there.
| | 04:43 | Abba: Yeah, that jumped out at me that what
I felt the best thing about these shots were
| | 04:47 | is that there is texture and lighting
there already, which makes it realistic.
| | 04:52 | The other thing I liked about your
selections is any of these can be used behind a still
| | 04:56 | image or a video image, because I can't tell
whether it's moving or not, and if the person
| | 05:01 | is moving, I mean, a wall or a cloud of the
backdrop to a city, I'm not distracted by
| | 05:06 | the fact that I don't see motion, and
they're going to work perfectly behind your video.
| | 05:10 | Rich: So this is some ideas on why we picked
and what we look for in background selections.
| | 05:15 | When we come back we'll talk a little bit
about some of the production techniques that
| | 05:19 | go into shooting these images.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Acquisition strategies for background plates| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: So let's talk a little bit about shooting
background plates here, and we'll begin where we left off.
| | 00:05 | These two images were both shot
at the same location in a church.
| | 00:09 | I made sure that when I compose these that I was
framing them realistically as if a subject was in there.
| | 00:15 | Now these are vertical images and for video
oftentimes a wider image is useful, but the
| | 00:20 | subject matter here just didn't lend it.
| | 00:22 | And there's such huge resolution, I've got
almost 5,000 pixels width that this is two
| | 00:26 | and half times wider than I need anyway.
| | 00:28 | So the extra height is just going to give
me some flexibility, giving me more options
| | 00:32 | to slide the image up and down and
adjust the height or the angle as I need to.
| | 00:38 | These are both raw as well.
| | 00:39 | Abba Shapiro: First of all, I've had the luxury or
the privilege of traveling with you, Rich,
| | 00:43 | when you've taken these pictures.
| | 00:45 | A lot of times we'll be walking around the
streets and all of these tourists are taking
| | 00:47 | beautiful pictures of the location, and Rich
is taking pictures of walls, doors, and ground.
| | 00:54 | People are looking at him like he's crazy,
but then he ends up with these really beautiful
| | 00:58 | backgrounds that he can use.
Rich: It works. These two were shot raw for that very reason.
| | 01:03 | If I quickly open this up in Photoshop, I want
you to see where it started versus where we took it.
| | 01:09 | So if we take this back as the default,
it's kind of flat and boring image.
| | 01:14 | But one of the things that I really like is
getting that sense of perspective and texture.
| | 01:18 | So taking the clarity up, that's one nice
things about raw followed with a little bit
| | 01:22 | of vibrance which is basically like a
broadcast safe saturation filter that really goes a
| | 01:27 | long way, and then you could play with your
blacks and your shadows to get nice crisp image.
| | 01:33 | If you look at the before and after, that
definitely has a lot more sense of texture,
| | 01:38 | and you could just feel
the bolts popping up there.
| | 01:41 | That's what I like,
backgrounds that don't feel flat.
| | 01:43 | This clearly has a 3D element plus some nice
lighting coming in from the side that I'm
| | 01:48 | going to be able to match.
| | 01:49 | Now on the other hand, I don't always have the benefit
of raw and sometimes I just go with what inspires me.
| | 01:56 | So this was just the iPhone, but I did used the HDR
capacity of the iPhone to get a better dynamic range.
| | 02:03 | Speaking of HDR, you shoot a lot of HDR as well.
| | 02:06 | This was an in-camera HDR using just a
camera phone, and this was a five-image shot on a
| | 02:15 | tripod, done everything right,
post-processed, NIK HDR, Efex HDR.
| | 02:19 | So obviously there's a difference between
the two images, but HDR makes great backdrops.
| | 02:24 | You like to use HDR too.
Abba: I love HDR.
| | 02:26 | I think sometimes people overprocess it,
but a camera doesn't see what our eye sees.
| | 02:31 | It either blows out the highlights or you
just lose all the detail in your shadows.
| | 02:37 | By shooting HDR, you can really get
that detail that makes it look real.
| | 02:41 | I think that the magic of both HDR and the
magic of raw is that you have such latitude
| | 02:47 | with controlling your image that you can
really give it a three dimensional feel even though
| | 02:53 | it's a two dimensional object.
| | 02:54 | Rich: Let's just bounce back quickly to your images,
and we'll talk about those from a production standpoint.
| | 03:00 | You definitely have a sense of angle here,
and you were able to bring a lot of nice detail
| | 03:04 | out in the skies there, and I love how you
processed this background from the original to the raw.
| | 03:10 | Let's just do a quick
comparison there on those two.
| | 03:13 | There we had the original.
| | 03:14 | Nice sense of perspective, but you really
were able to bring out that detail and color
| | 03:18 | which just makes this a great backdrop.
There's a lot of detail here.
| | 03:22 | But with some post processing we can have
that background fall off a little bit more,
| | 03:26 | and we've got such a clean line that you could
just feel where the subject would fit in the shot.
| | 03:31 | Abba: Yeah, It actually begs to
have somebody super imposed into it.
| | 03:34 | And I really loved the graffiti and wanted
it to pop, and I did the exact same thing
| | 03:38 | with this that you did with the wall is
that I pushed the clarity up, and then I moved
| | 03:43 | the vibrance off, a little bit more of saturation,
and really controlled the black and the white
| | 03:47 | levels so it would pop, and it
would give that three dimensional feel.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Processing in Camera Raw| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: We teach people about the
benefits of raw, and we describe the process.
| | 00:04 | Let's actually prepare an
image from scratch here.
| | 00:07 | So Abba, we've got a
great image here that you shot.
| | 00:10 | I was actually with you here.
We're in Jerusalem I believe.
| | 00:12 | Abba Shapiro: Yes, and this surprised me to see all
this graffiti in the Old City, but the contrast
| | 00:17 | between the ancient walls and the modern
graffiti that just kind of spoke to me, and I thought
| | 00:21 | it would be a great background.
| | 00:22 | Rich: So I'm going to set the
exposure pretty close to the base exposure.
| | 00:26 | Take a little bit of contrast up in and
maybe recover some of those highlights.
| | 00:30 | Where do we want to push
here, clarity and vibrance?
| | 00:32 | Abba: Yeah, let's start with clarity, and
that's going to really give us some edging
| | 00:36 | on this, and you'll notice when you move the
clarity up that your color changes a little bit.
| | 00:41 | So you'll be playing back and forth with your
sliders until you get the look and feel that you want.
| | 00:46 | Rich: And that definitely put
some details in the black there.
| | 00:48 | We obviously can adjust the color
temperature and find the right balance.
| | 00:52 | Why don't you go ahead and just set that
where you think it should be right, and then we'll
| | 00:56 | play with the depth of field?
| | 00:58 | Abba: Okay, so I also used the histogram
just not necessarily to set my image, but
| | 01:05 | I use it to make sure that I'm not really
losing any detail in my shadows or really
| | 01:09 | blowing out my highlights.
| | 01:10 | So I always keep a third eye
on that as I move my sliders.
| | 01:14 | Rich: Go ahead and click these two
triangles in the upper left corners.
| | 01:18 | That's going to actually give you
some warnings within the image itself.
| | 01:21 | So you see there it's warning us
that the blacks are indeed clipped.
| | 01:25 | In fact, they're clipped only in the blue channel,
but that is telling you that you do have clipping.
| | 01:29 | Meaning that that's 100% pure black
there, a 0 value on the RGB scales.
| | 01:35 | So there's no detail.
| | 01:36 | So that's sort of a warning sign, and we
can get highlight clipping warnings and shadow
| | 01:40 | clipping warnings as we work.
| | 01:41 | Abba: Let's go ahead and just
bring the shadows up a little bit.
| | 01:44 | I really don't mind
losing the detail in the door.
| | 01:47 | But if I wanted to make sure that there was
a hint of detail, I could go ahead with my
| | 01:52 | shadow slider, and this just brings up
the very left edge of your histogram.
| | 01:57 | The blacks is kind of a larger area.
| | 02:00 | My shadows is a more refined area, and as you see,
I can bring it up until I just lose all of it.
| | 02:05 | But if I go too far, I'm
losing some of that punch.
| | 02:08 | So I'm going to kind of split the difference
and let some of the blacks get completely lost.
| | 02:13 | Rich: Which is okay, because some
of these things are pure dark shadows.
| | 02:16 | Abba: Right, and it's going to make
the image look better in the long run.
| | 02:20 | I wouldn't normally do this, but I'm going
to go ahead and blow out my highlights just
| | 02:23 | so you can see what
happens when we're in Camera Raw.
| | 02:27 | So I can grab the highlights here, and I
can bring them all the way up and what you'll
| | 02:31 | notice is you see red and the red
indicates where we've lost all detail in our image.
| | 02:36 | Rich: Good, so go ahead and set the image
where you would normally develop this as,
| | 02:40 | and then we'll adjust the depth of field.
| | 02:42 | Abba: So I like that.
The clarity is up all the way.
| | 02:46 | I might add a little bit of
saturation to make it pop a little bit.
| | 02:49 | They kind of complement each other, but you're right,
vibrance is a little bit different than saturation.
| | 02:53 | As a matter of fact, a lot of people get confused
about the differences between vibrance and saturation.
| | 02:58 | Rich: Vibrance tends to
boost the non-skin tones more.
| | 03:01 | So it's going to go after blues
and greens and leave reds more alone.
| | 03:05 | So from a broadcast point of view, since a
lot of times we're doing keying for video,
| | 03:09 | I like to boost vibrance before saturation,
and it does a nicer job of rounding it off.
| | 03:15 | It puts it in the areas that the eye expects
there to be vibrancy like blue skies, green
| | 03:20 | grass, as opposed to sunburned skin.
| | 03:22 | Abba: Yeah, and I like the fact that you do
that whether there's a person in the shot or not.
| | 03:26 | A lot of people use vibrance only when they
have somebody already in the shot and they're
| | 03:30 | afraid to heighten their skin tones.
| | 03:32 | But here you're just trying to make it
match before we even start the composite.
| | 03:35 | Rich: All right, so are
you happy with the image?
| | 03:37 | Abba: I think it's pretty good for now,
and we can probably tweak it later.
| | 03:40 | But there's one other thing I'd
like to sometimes take a look at.
| | 03:44 | With Camera Raw I can go over here, and I
can actually enable the camera lens profile
| | 03:49 | and sometimes that corrects the distortion
and makes the shot look a little more natural.
| | 03:54 | Other times, I actually like
the way the distortion looks.
| | 03:57 | So if I check that, it looks better, and you
can see that it actually analyzes what lens
| | 04:03 | I was using, a really wide-angle lens at 10- to
22-millimeter, but it does tweak it a little bit.
| | 04:07 | Now in addition to that when I use some of
my cheaper lenses, I find I do have a little
| | 04:13 | bit of chromatic aberration,
which is that fringing on the edge.
| | 04:17 | I find that if I click on this, it will get
rid of that fringing pretty nicely so that
| | 04:22 | if somebody zoomed in to my image, they
see that the background looks really nice.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Processing depth of field| 00:01 | Rich Harrington: Well, this is looking really good here,
and I'm just going to finish this off with
| | 00:04 | just a little bit of a post crop vignette
darkening the edges down, and it just sort
| | 00:08 | of puts a little bit at the edge,
and I think that's looks good.
| | 00:11 | And we'll come down here to the bottom and check and
make sure that we're opening this as a Smart Object.
| | 00:16 | That's going to embed this original object
inside the layer, and when I click Open Object,
| | 00:21 | a new Photoshop file will be made, and it's
going to drop that in, and that works nicely.
| | 00:25 | But at anytime I could jump back to that.
Let's just maximize our window here.
| | 00:30 | If I need to go back into Camera Raw, a
double-click on the icon there will open up the Camera
| | 00:34 | Raw dialog so that's nice and
easy and gives you that flexibility.
| | 00:38 | Now when I'm happy with this I'm going to
go ahead and duplicate this layer, and I need
| | 00:43 | to go ahead and actually rasterize that because
the Lens Blur filter will not work on a Smart Object.
| | 00:50 | So I'm going to keep that background copy
there as a backup, and we'll just rasterize
| | 00:54 | this, and we'll call it Depth.
| | 00:57 | And what we're going to do is make a
depth matte using the Alpha channels.
| | 01:03 | So if I come over here I can make a new
Alpha channel, and I turn that on and essentially
| | 01:08 | we're just going to draw some perspective
so we'll take the Polygonal Lasso here and
| | 01:14 | just sort of draw out the lines to define
the walls and what's here, there we go, and
| | 01:21 | I'm going to take my Gradient tool, and we're
going to go and draw a gradient from white to black.
| | 01:28 | So there I go, I've got black to white so
that's fine, so we'll just draw that first
| | 01:31 | one, and it did a little
bit of this perspective.
| | 01:36 | Let's take the Polygonal Lasso here and draw
this out again, draw, and I'm just defining
| | 01:43 | where the walls are, there we go, and I
try pretty hard to keep that in line, you got
| | 01:50 | to--we'll blur it out when
we're done so it will be fine.
| | 01:53 | Double-click and grab the Gradient tool and
draw again, trying to just match the angle
| | 02:01 | of the wall there, and then we'll do the
same thing on this last side since this is sort
| | 02:06 | of three-sided chamber, there we go.
| | 02:11 | And I can get really fancy if I wanted and trace around
all these objects, but I'll just keep it pretty simple.
| | 02:17 | Abba Shapiro: When this was shot, it was shot very
sharp with a very large depth of field because
| | 02:24 | being able to control the depth of field
in post gives you so much more flexibility.
| | 02:28 | Rich: So I just drew out a little depth matte,
and if we look at that, you kind of get the
| | 02:33 | idea by just looking at that that there is
a sense of a perspective, a quarter here.
| | 02:37 | And I'm just going to touch up this little
gap here that I created that I didn't want,
| | 02:42 | take the Smudge tool, and this is kind of
like finger painting, and I'm just going to
| | 02:46 | push that in and get rid of that line a
little bit, and that's looks pretty good.
| | 02:51 | And I'll just do a very gentle blur on
that channel so it's just a little bit softer.
| | 02:56 | So there is a Gaussian blur, and
we're just getting rid of the seams a bit.
| | 03:00 | But you could see--if you look at that, right.
Doesn't look like channel a bit more?
| | 03:04 | Abba: Yeah, it looks like this is the
pre-render for some animation for this wall.
| | 03:09 | Rich: Yeah, so, we're in
pretty good shape there.
| | 03:12 | And I've got the channel, I'll just turn its
visibility off, select the RGB channels, and
| | 03:18 | we could say Filter > Blur > Lens Blur.
| | 03:22 | And this allows us to use the Alpha channel
as a depth matte, and you see there how the
| | 03:28 | foreground is in focus, but as it goes
further and further away it falls out of focus.
| | 03:33 | So you could then adjust the Blur Distance,
and if you look at that there, let's turn
| | 03:39 | that off an on, what you'll see is that I
pushed the areas further away out of focus.
| | 03:45 | Now that's much more than I would do, so I'll just back
that off a little bit, and let's adjust the Radius there.
| | 03:51 | But that's just a little bit of a blur so the
things that are farther away fall out of focus.
| | 03:56 | So if you look at that door way, it's just
not as crisp as it was before, and this now
| | 04:00 | feels more natural, and it's ready for the
subject to be dropped in so she won't have
| | 04:06 | to compete as much against the backdrop.
| | 04:07 | Abba: And I think the magic thing
that you did there is understatement.
| | 04:12 | Most people when they try to do depth of field
they over shoot, and you see this really blurry
| | 04:16 | area, and that really sharp area,
and that's actually more distracting.
| | 04:20 | The subtlety of the blur is actually
making this a much more realistic background and
| | 04:25 | a much more realistic image.
| | 04:26 | Rich: And if you really want to sell that
you just put a little bit of noise in there
| | 04:31 | and even monochromatic in this case.
| | 04:33 | And if you look closely, let's zoom in here
you'll see that by putting the noise texture
| | 04:39 | in--let's turn that off for a second.
| | 04:43 | With no noise, it looks a little artificial,
but a little bit of noise makes that just
| | 04:47 | look believable because there would
have been grain in the original photo.
| | 04:50 | So I find that when I blur an image, I
have to introduce a small amount of noise back
| | 04:54 | into it so that it looks natural.
| | 04:57 | So while that's defocused, it doesn't lack any texture
because the original photo did have noise and grain.
| | 05:03 | So I'll go ahead and click okay, and we now
have our original and our newly composited one.
| | 05:10 | And the nice thing here is I can
always rerun that if I need to.
| | 05:13 | But if I decide it was too much, I could
just simply adjust the Opacity between the two
| | 05:18 | layers, and I can mix it.
| | 05:20 | So if I was using this effect, and I
overdid it, like I had that blur too high to begin
| | 05:25 | with, that's okay because I've got both layers.
| | 05:30 | Adjust the Opacity between them and back that
off a bit so I've got the best of both worlds,
| | 05:35 | easy flexibility there, and I think
this background is done and ready to use.
| | 05:39 | Abba: Absolutely, and I love the fact that
you did duplicate the layers, because playing
| | 05:44 | with Opacity can save you a lot of time
and give you the exact look that you want.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Processing background images| 00:01 | Rich Harrington: Let's go ahead and prepare backdrops so it's
100% ready to drop into a non-linear editing tool.
| | 00:06 | And NLEs do a lot better when you give them
the photos at exactly the right size you need
| | 00:10 | for the timeline, because they're
not that good at scaling photos.
| | 00:13 | So I'll jump over the Photoshop and choose
File > New, and you'll see at the top we have
| | 00:19 | a preset list for film and video.
And Abba, how do we shoot our footage?
| | 00:24 | Abba Shapiro: Well, we're shooting our footage first
of all in high def, so normally that would
| | 00:27 | be considered 1920x1080 pixels.
| | 00:28 | Rich: Yeah, so I'm going to hit OK, and
that opens up a document, and it's ready to go.
| | 00:35 | Let's just simply use the File > Place
command which will allow us to navigate to an image,
| | 00:41 | and when we click Place it's going to
automatically add it as a Smart Object.
| | 00:45 | Now it's scaled it down because
that's what the Place command does.
| | 00:48 | This photo actually has a lot more resolution.
| | 00:50 | You'll see that it scaled it to a third of
its original size so in fact I'm going to
| | 00:53 | ahead and take that back
up to a 100% and hit OK.
| | 00:58 | And when I apply that, it's
automatically saved in the Smart Objects.
| | 01:02 | We got lots of detail there.
| | 01:04 | Let's zoom out a little bit, and we want to create a
sense of perspective, we don't have it here already.
| | 01:10 | So let's just go ahead with that Free Transform
command, and I'll right-click and choose Perspective,
| | 01:17 | and we can introduce a sense of angle.
That works pretty well.
| | 01:24 | Now it feels a little bit more like it's at
an angle to that wall, and then I could just
| | 01:29 | right-click and go back to
Scale and adjust it to size.
| | 01:33 | Anything you want to change?
| | 01:35 | Abba: Well, one thing I like to do is I
like to save it in this direction and then so I
| | 01:40 | have a backup, I like to save it with a
perspective in the other direction so when I'm editing,
| | 01:45 | I can go back and forth
and make the best decision.
| | 01:48 | Rich: So we can call that left and then
just duplicate that layer, Ctrl+J, we'll call
| | 01:53 | that right, and because it's a Smart
Object none of the resolution was distorted.
| | 02:01 | So we could just re-invoke that and go back to
Perspective and switch it to go the other way.
| | 02:08 | And that's one of the benefits there of
the Smart Object is that everything was still
| | 02:12 | in there, and we can recover it, and
I'll Scale that a little bit and apply it.
| | 02:22 | Now that works nicely, and if I'm happy with
those we can even take advantage of the fact
| | 02:27 | that we have some new blurs.
| | 02:29 | Now in order to run these we're going to
need to rasterize the layer first, so I'll just
| | 02:33 | go ahead since I'm happy with that
layer, and I'll just convert that.
| | 02:39 | Now we could take advantage of the Tilt-Shift Blur,
and this allows me to go ahead and adjust this.
| | 02:48 | Abba: Now I love the new interface, because
it's a what you see is what you get interface.
| | 02:52 | You can work with the blur right
on the image and affect it that way.
| | 02:57 | Rich: Yeah, and this little area is just
the transition zone so we can create a nice
| | 03:02 | gentle transition from what's blurred to
what's not blurred, and I'll just adjust that there,
| | 03:09 | and you see that you're
getting that blur effect.
| | 03:12 | And what's happening if we turn that off
and on is you see we're creating again a sense
| | 03:16 | of fall off as it goes further away.
| | 03:19 | So that looks great, and I'll just go ahead
and hit OK, and we've got both options there.
| | 03:23 | So just some general strategies for prepping
backdrops, there is a few more images in the
| | 03:27 | downloadable files for those of you who want
to play and feel free to look at some of those
| | 03:31 | and try out some of your own techniques to
prep them, and then we'll bring those in and
| | 03:35 | start to key in just a moment.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Creating Backgrounds in a Nonlinear Editing ToolInitial processing| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: So we've got backdrops, we've
got our best images picked, now what?
| | 00:04 | Abba Shapiro: Well, now we're going to actually
take it into Photoshop and start compositing.
| | 00:07 | We're going to put that foreground with that
background, and we're going to remove the green screen.
| | 00:11 | Rich: Yeah, and it's not as simple as just
knocking out the backdrop and slapping two
| | 00:15 | layers together, right?
| | 00:16 | Abba: Not at all, as a matter
of fact that's the easy part.
| | 00:19 | The key is to make your key
look like it doesn't exist at all.
| | 00:23 | Rich: Yeah, so this is going
to take a couple of extra steps.
| | 00:26 | Once we've made a good selection and
generated a nondestructive mask that we can refine,
| | 00:30 | we're going to do things like improve the
background blurring, color matching and color
| | 00:35 | grading are going to be incredibly important
and then of course there is always the problem
| | 00:39 | of getting the two things to look
like they were lit the same way.
| | 00:41 | Abba: Yeah, and that's the trick, the trick
is if you want to do a really nice green screen,
| | 00:46 | it should not look like a processed shot.
| | 00:49 | It should look like you were right there on
location and captured the moment perfectly.
| | 00:53 | Rich: Fortunately Photoshop has a lot of
great tools, including some updated tools
| | 00:57 | for adding digital lights, and we could really
refine this and get a great overall composite.
| | 01:03 | We've got a bunch of images here on green
screen and one that wasn't shot on green screen
| | 01:07 | that we'll take a look at in a moment.
| | 01:09 | Let's just open those five up because there's
a lot things in common with them and a quick
| | 01:12 | double-click will bring
them all into Camera Raw.
| | 01:15 | Abba: And one of the nice things about
Camera Raw is if things are very similar, you can
| | 01:19 | apply the same process across multiple images.
| | 01:22 | Rich: Yeah, so I think we can go ahead
here and Select All, and we'll just do an Auto
| | 01:26 | as a starting point, and that will open some
things up, and then we'll go in and start to refine.
| | 01:32 | I think a quick highlight
recovery there. That works well.
| | 01:36 | We have the clipping warnings turned on from
before so this allows us to see if something
| | 01:41 | is going to clip, we got a little clipping
there in the Red channel, but that seems okay.
| | 01:44 | I'm going to go ahead and push the
Vibrance so we get a nice rich green, and it's not
| | 01:50 | affecting the skin tones as much.
Does that one look okay for you?
| | 01:52 | Abba: That looks pretty good and one thing
to keep in mind is I didn't care whether the
| | 01:56 | lights were in the shot or not because I'm
going to be able to the crop those out whether
| | 01:59 | we do a green screen are not.
| | 02:01 | Rich: Yeah, so it looks pretty good there,
we'll just go ahead and recover a few things,
| | 02:05 | pull the Exposure down just a little.
| | 02:06 | Abba: Yeah, let's give that a richness, I
want her to look a little bit tough and so
| | 02:11 | we'll notch up the contrast a little bit,
make sure the blacks are nice and deep.
| | 02:15 | It hardens her up a little bit, it makes her
look a little bit tougher, and I like that.
| | 02:19 | Rich: Yeah, we've got some nice
strong shadows there by pushing the blacks.
| | 02:23 | So with that there I'm going to go ahead
and select, and I'll click Synchronize, and we
| | 02:28 | can choose which properties we synchronize so
we'll go ahead and synchronize the Highlights,
| | 02:33 | Shadows, Blacks, Clarity, Vibrance
and Saturation, and that works well.
| | 02:38 | We didn't touch these other properties yet,
so I'll just uncheck those since we're not
| | 02:41 | dealing with any sort of
vignetting or sharpening.
| | 02:44 | I'll click OK and all of
those other images become synced.
| | 02:48 | So now when we click on over, you see that a lot
of that blacks, and that richness was already there.
| | 02:52 | And we're going to push this a little bit
further and of course each image is slightly different.
| | 02:57 | So we'll open that up a bit, that's looking
pretty good, and we're going to want to pull
| | 03:01 | down some of those
Highlights for her skin tones.
| | 03:03 | What are you thinking?
| | 03:05 | Abba: I think a little bit of highlights,
but I really liked is how well the sweat that
| | 03:09 | we artificially created is
showing up on this close-up.
| | 03:12 | But you're right, we do have a little bit a
shine in the forehead, but that's okay because
| | 03:15 | again it brings a sense of natural light.
| | 03:18 | If we put her in a stadium which has floodlights, that
may look more natural with the shine on her forehead.
| | 03:24 | Rich: Yup, and let's just finish that out,
that's looking pretty good there, we'll open
| | 03:27 | it up just a little, nice rich
black, we'll back that off just a tad.
| | 03:32 | That's looking pretty good.
| | 03:32 | Abba: I think I'll take her
highlights down a little bit, yeah.
| | 03:35 | Rich: Yeah, and I think
that's looking nice there.
| | 03:38 | There we go, picked up the bridge of the nose,
a little more saturation on this one, and
| | 03:44 | let's go on these next two here.
| | 03:45 | Abba: Now what's interesting about this
one is I really don't care about the model, I
| | 03:49 | wanted to get the ball in mid-air because
I'm going to just key that ball into the next
| | 03:54 | shot so I can position it
exactly where I want it to be.
| | 03:57 | Rich: So I'm just going to adjust that
separately there with the contrast and the highlights.
| | 04:01 | So that's looking pretty good there, let's
put a little bit more clarity so that soccer
| | 04:05 | ball pops, and we'll play with the blacks.
| | 04:08 | I think this looks pretty good for the ball,
and then we'll finish her out, and I think
| | 04:14 | you want a little bit more recovery,
she's a little bright there, right.
| | 04:17 | Abba: Right, she has a very fair skin, and I
want to make sure that she has some saturation
| | 04:20 | to her skin instead of being so translucent.
| | 04:23 | Rich: Adjusting the Shadows slider there is actually
making it a little bit easier to get the backdrop.
| | 04:28 | So this is good, we don't have the same
challenges that we do with keying for video because it's
| | 04:34 | not that hard to make a selection, she is
not moving around here, so the background
| | 04:37 | doesn't have to be quite as even.
| | 04:40 | This is just easier if we can
get that green nice and tight.
| | 04:42 | Abba: And one of the beauties of shooting
Camera Raw is we do have that dynamic range
| | 04:46 | to work with in the color space, so it's going to be
easier to separate the green from the rest of the image.
| | 04:52 | Rich: So let's go ahead and select all of
those images and open them up, and we'll process
| | 04:56 | them and add transparency in Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating transparency in Photoshop| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: We've got a basic image here,
and we want to go ahead and cut her off, we're not
| | 00:03 | going to worry so much about the legs down
here right, we're just getting sort of a waist
| | 00:07 | shot or what do you want in here?
| | 00:07 | Abba Shapiro: Yeah, we're probably going to cut it off
right at the shorts, you know right at the hipline.
| | 00:12 | I want the hand to be in the shot because
I don't want a hand dangling, but I think
| | 00:16 | that's about a good framing, I am not too
worried about the legs as a matter of fact,
| | 00:20 | you can go ahead and crop out the right side, because
we're also only going to position her in the background.
| | 00:24 | Rich: Yep, and so I've got that marked,
I'll uncheck Delete Crop Pixels but that looks
| | 00:28 | pretty good and what we're going to do is
take advantage of the Select > Color Range
| | 00:32 | command which allows us to click
and then start to make a selection.
| | 00:37 | Now what you want to do is take
advantage of couple of options here.
| | 00:40 | We're going to use the normal method first
and holding down the Shift key I could just
| | 00:44 | start to click and add, and you
see it picks up more and more areas.
| | 00:49 | Now that works pretty well and in this
case we didn't really have any color spill, so
| | 00:54 | I could just adjust the
Fuzziness and what do you think?
| | 00:57 | Abba: I think that's a real good start,
I'm curious to see how it's going to look when
| | 01:00 | you hit the OK button.
| | 01:02 | Rich: So we'll go ahead and click OK to add
that, and we got a pretty good selection of
| | 01:05 | the green but we want
everything except the green.
| | 01:08 | So we'll just choose Select > Inverse, and
then we'll click the Refine Edge button, and
| | 01:14 | it did a pretty good job.
| | 01:15 | But obviously there's some
problem areas there still, right?
| | 01:18 | Abba: Yeah, we still have a fringe of
green and hair is always a challenge.
| | 01:22 | Rich: Well, this is why they
invented the Smart Radius command.
| | 01:25 | So before I panic I always turn Smart Radius
on and analyze it, and you see that that did
| | 01:30 | a pretty good job of getting
some of that issue.
| | 01:33 | Abba: Absolutely.
| | 01:34 | Rich: And now we could just take our
paintbrush, and we can have this little Brush tool here
| | 01:40 | and what I'll do is I'll just paint at the edge.
| | 01:44 | Now as I paint on that it's going to analyze
it and clean up a little bit, and that's pretty
| | 01:47 | good, but you can also choose this
other option called Decontaminate Colors.
| | 01:53 | As you adjust that there it's going to look
at the edges and start to pick up the fringe.
| | 01:57 | So we could just simply fringe that in
just a little bit, shift the edge, Smooth that
| | 02:02 | out, add a little Feather, and
you see that's doing pretty good.
| | 02:07 | Abba: That's a pretty clean key just a
couple of spots that we need to touch up.
| | 02:11 | Rich: Yeah and so I'm going to go ahead there
and just brush over that edge and let it analyze,
| | 02:16 | and you see that as you brush it starts to
reanalyze the area, and it forces it to clean
| | 02:22 | it up even further.
So I think that's pretty good for now.
| | 02:26 | She is a soccer player, we can go ahead and touch that
up a little bit more afterwards, but what do you think?
| | 02:30 | Abba: I think that's pretty going, and
once we start keying that in we can even paint
| | 02:34 | out those few fly away hairs if we wanted to.
| | 02:36 | Rich: Yeah, I think that looks pretty good
there, I'm just going to shift that edge a
| | 02:40 | little bit more in.
That's too far there so we'll back it off.
| | 02:43 | Abba: That is one of the problems that a
lot of people experience when keying is they're
| | 02:47 | so afraid of the green that they actually
shrink everything down and they end up cropping
| | 02:52 | out the edges of people, and
you get that helmet head look.
| | 02:55 | Rich: Yeah, I think that looks pretty
good there, I'll go ahead and click OK, and it
| | 03:00 | adds a layer mask to that, and you see it
made a new layer so I've got my original layer,
| | 03:06 | and I've got my mask layer, and that works well.
| | 03:09 | So even though the preview showed a little
bit of green, it pretty much took that all out.
| | 03:13 | Abba: Yeah, it just gave us some translucency.
| | 03:14 | Now, I want to point out something that
could haunt us later, and if you noticed if you
| | 03:20 | jump between the original and the new one
on her face, she has green eyes, and you'll
| | 03:25 | notice that her eyes are
actually becoming translucent.
| | 03:29 | So if we layer on the background,
we may actually see the background.
| | 03:33 | Rich: Notice here, this
is a nondestructive mask.
| | 03:36 | So if I just got my Paintbrush tool and
click on the mask, I could paint with white and
| | 03:42 | all of that detail gets put back in just
like the little of bit of the green on her cheek
| | 03:46 | there, and you see how her chin was reflecting a
little bit of green, all of that is nondestructive.
| | 03:52 | So that's why you have the Masking tool,
and you apply it as a mask because it becomes
| | 03:56 | super easy for you to just switch back and forth between
black and white, and you could just paint that in.
| | 04:01 | Abba: Now, can you switch
and show us just the mask?
| | 04:04 | Rich: You can, so you go over and look at
just the individual mask in the Channels panel
| | 04:09 | if you want to see it, but that makes it
sometimes a little bit easier to spot if you had problems
| | 04:14 | and holes, like there's a little hole, and
you see you can sort of work your way through.
| | 04:20 | That's partial transparency so that's okay,
but you can always refine that with a little
| | 04:25 | bit of a Blur tool, and we're going to take a
look at refining these a little bit later on.
| | 04:29 | All right, let's go ahead and clean up that ball.
You want to put this tool just there.
| | 04:32 | Abba: I want to be able to composite the
ball as if she's about to hit it with her head.
| | 04:36 | So of course, the first thing we need to
do is just crop out everything but the ball,
| | 04:39 | there's no reason to work with anything else.
| | 04:42 | Rich: Yeah, pretty straightforward and in
this case I will Delete the Cropped Pixels
| | 04:47 | because I don't need them.
Let's just zoom that up, lots of room.
| | 04:51 | In this case we could select the green but
we might not need to because it's kind of
| | 04:57 | a regular shaped object.
| | 04:58 | Abba: Right, sometimes we forget the simple ways of
doing something, and we do something much more complex.
| | 05:04 | As a matter of fact, the way you're doing
it is a lot easier because there is a little
| | 05:07 | bit of green reflection on the white ball.
| | 05:10 | Rich: Yes, I'll just use the Transform
Selection command there and adjust that a little bit.
| | 05:15 | That's looking pretty good, we've got the
ball selected, we'll go ahead and apply that
| | 05:19 | and then to make it look a little more believable
this is where a bit of feathering could come into play.
| | 05:25 | It's still good that we shot it clean and free.
| | 05:28 | But remember once you've done that, you could
apply a layer mask by just clicking, and then
| | 05:33 | you've got the same controls.
| | 05:35 | So with the mask selected if you open up the
Inspector here, and we go into the Properties
| | 05:41 | panel, you see that you've got the ability there to
click the Mask Edge and look, Decontaminate Colors.
| | 05:48 | So we can clean that up and
remove some of that green spill.
| | 05:52 | We can adjust that and Feather it a little
bit if necessary, and that works pretty well.
| | 05:58 | I like that and remember, if you've got the
green spill, don't be afraid to take advantage
| | 06:04 | of the Sponge tool which
simply soaks up areas of color.
| | 06:10 | So I'll move that over. There we go.
| | 06:16 | Abba: Now we're getting the ball back to
the true color white that we expect it to be.
| | 06:21 | Rich: Yeah, If it goes too far, you can
always adjust the Intensity here and Saturate or
| | 06:29 | Desaturate, but little gentle strokes, and that's
okay in this case, or you can even roll that hue.
| | 06:35 | But I'm going to do that whole panel
there, and it definitely got rid of it.
| | 06:40 | Now there's a little bit of a
shadow there but that's okay.
| | 06:42 | There's supposed to be a shadow there
because it's the back side of the ball.
| | 06:47 | So I think we're looking pretty good there.
| | 06:49 | A little bit more and what do think?
| | 06:53 | Abba: I think it's pretty good, and I
like the fact that you put a Feather on it.
| | 06:56 | Sometimes people make their edges so
sharp and again that doesn't look natural.
| | 07:01 | Things naturally kind of blend together so,
a real sharp edge on that ball, it would have
| | 07:05 | just look like you glued it onto the shot.
| | 07:07 | Rich: Yeah, I like to sometimes remind people that
life is a bit squishy, so you need soft edges.
| | 07:12 | Abba: Absolutely.
| | 07:13 | Rich: All right, so we got one more
shot here that you want to process.
| | 07:15 | I saw what you did with this final image.
| | 07:17 | This looks great, and we'll crop here out
and how far down did you go on the shorts?
| | 07:27 | Abba: I cut her right about at the hip.
| | 07:30 | The tricky thing is her hand crosses from our
green background to our other green background,
| | 07:35 | but I think we're going to
be able to pull this off.
| | 07:37 | Rich: All right, so we'll apply the crop, and
we'll take advantage of the Select Color Range command.
| | 07:43 | In this case I am going to use the Localized
Color Cluster option which narrows where it clicks.
| | 07:48 | So when I first click, you see that it has
an initial tolerance of how far it reaches.
| | 07:53 | So this makes this tool more precise, so
as you click it doesn't select everywhere in
| | 07:58 | the image like the Magic Wand tool would,
and it makes it much simpler to start to pick
| | 08:02 | some of the problem areas.
| | 08:04 | Notice you can click in the little mask area
here if you want or in the image itself, and
| | 08:09 | as you do it starts to adjust and pick up more.
| | 08:12 | I like this because I find it's a little
more forgiving, and it makes sure that even if
| | 08:18 | I click here on this black area that it
didn't go too far into the rest of the image.
| | 08:22 | Abba: Now you're holding down a modifier
key as you're clicking it is that correct?
| | 08:25 | Rich: Yeah the Shift key just adds and the
Option or the Alt key will subtract, but because
| | 08:31 | we're using that with a combination of the Localized Clusters,
you notice there that it doesn't go too far.
| | 08:39 | So it becomes very easy, even though it
crossed that black line, I was able to select that
| | 08:44 | black line and add it to my selection.
| | 08:47 | But it didn't select any of the black anywhere
else because we narrowed it to a smaller range.
| | 08:52 | So you see how we got a pretty good image?
Abba: That's pretty good and pretty quick.
| | 08:56 | Rich: Yeah, and I'll just hold down the
Alt key there and click on the ball to pick up
| | 09:00 | some of the area that was getting picked up that
we didn't want, there we go, that looks pretty good.
| | 09:06 | By the way, there is a Detect Faces option
which also works if it's just skin tones.
| | 09:11 | Click OK, there is our initial selection,
let's inverse that, and we'll refine the edge.
| | 09:19 | Now, same problem with her
eyes we'll come into that.
| | 09:25 | But let's zoom in here and take a
look at some of our tough areas.
| | 09:32 | Pretty good, and we'll just take out some
of that problem area, let's paint over this
| | 09:39 | hair so it reanalyzes the hair.
| | 09:41 | Hair is always one of those tricky ones but
Photoshop has gotten a lot better with newer
| | 09:47 | versions, and you see it tightens that up.
| | 09:49 | Abba: And I remember from the last one you
did that even though we saw a little bit of
| | 09:53 | green in the hair, once the mask was
applied, it really just became translucency.
| | 09:57 | Rich: Yeah, and it's really easy to fix.
| | 09:59 | So we got a few problems here but that's just going to be
touched up in the mask. I'm not too worried about it.
| | 10:04 | All right we've got a layer mask chosen, and
it might pick up a little more than we want
| | 10:10 | but that's okay, we can go ahead and easily
paint within, in fact I'll just Ctrl-click
| | 10:14 | on that as a selection and inverse it, and
now I could just go ahead and paint right
| | 10:20 | on the mask, and I don't have to worry so
much about even staying inside the lines because
| | 10:25 | I have a basic selection.
Abba: So my first grade teacher was wrong?
| | 10:28 | Rich: Yes, you don't get
penalized for going outside the lines.
| | 10:30 | Abba: Thank you Adobe.
| | 10:32 | Rich: And we'll just paint
that in a little bit there.
| | 10:34 | We've got those folds of the fabric there,
notice how that was picking up some of the
| | 10:38 | green screen, it was a little
pool of shadows, pretty good.
| | 10:42 | And this is just the
ability here to go in and refine.
| | 10:46 | Now, remember you always can touch things up,
so if the hair isn't exactly how you want,
| | 10:51 | this is where using things like the Smudge
tool comes in handy, and you could do things
| | 10:56 | like push just the dark pixels, and you see
there that I could just push that little edge
| | 11:01 | in and still preserves some of the hair detail,
but it allows you to sort of refine things.
| | 11:10 | Abba: It's not an exact science, so
the Undo button is not a bad thing.
| | 11:13 | Rich: No, you might find yourself cleaning it up and
on that hair there, that's always the toughest area.
| | 11:18 | Touch that up, let's deselect the area, and
we'll choose Select Color Range, and I could
| | 11:25 | use the Green preset, and it's going to pick
some of that green, and we could just attach
| | 11:33 | a adjustment there and pull down just
the green areas a bit and so that helps.
| | 11:40 | Lots of little touchup, but that's looking
pretty good and before we obsess about everything
| | 11:44 | being perfect, we should start to drop that into the
backdrop because a lot of times things will go away.
| | 11:48 | Abba: Right, actually once you start
compositing sometimes a little green disappears once you
| | 11:53 | start modifying the image.
| | 11:54 | Rich: Now there's one last thing we have
to clean up, and that's just in many fashions
| | 11:58 | you don't have the ability to show a logo,
so we'll just make a new empty layer here,
| | 12:04 | and we're going to grab the Clone tool, and
we'll just Alt-click, choose Sample All Layers,
| | 12:11 | and this makes it very easy for
us to start to blend that out.
| | 12:16 | And this will allow us to take anything
that's not supposed to be seen, and this is very
| | 12:20 | common sometimes with logo wear or other options
that you might just need to clean it up a little.
| | 12:25 | Abba: Even a smudge on the clothes, and I like
the Clone layer because it still keeps texture in.
| | 12:29 | Rich: Yeah, and if we change your mind or
we want to see the before and after, you could
| | 12:34 | turn it off and on to see what you did.
| | 12:35 | But that looks pretty good, and I think this
photo is about ready to go tot the next stage.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Removing the background for subjects not shot on a chroma key| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: We've been keying with a nice green
screen, but sometimes people don't have it,
| | 00:05 | so in this case we'll open up that image,
and it's pretty straightforward, this is just
| | 00:09 | a thing you did on normal photo paper, right?
| | 00:11 | Abba Shapiro: Right, and this is a tough one to
do because normally I would have shot her on
| | 00:15 | a different color background because her dress has a
lot of white in it, and that does make it more challenging.
| | 00:21 | So what you want to do if you can't shoot
green screen, and you're shooting on paper,
| | 00:23 | and you know you want to do a key, if the
roles are different color--in this case gray
| | 00:28 | would have worked out well--or if I had lit
it so that the white really was blown out,
| | 00:33 | it would have made it easier. But we're not
going to make it easy on ourselves because
| | 00:36 | we want to show that you can you do
it even if you have a challenging shot.
| | 00:40 | So I'm going to go ahead to that end and
actually post the saturation here because remember,
| | 00:44 | we're going to push this up for now, but
then we can come back in and bring it back down.
| | 00:48 | So I'll make sure that this is going to open
up as a Smart Object, there it is, and I'll
| | 00:53 | click Open, and it brings
it in as a smart Object.
| | 00:57 | So with that said we'll just quickly crop
out some of the areas we don't need, so we're
| | 01:01 | doing the least amount of
work possible, and there we go.
| | 01:06 | What I'm going to do is try a
command I like called Calculations.
| | 01:11 | Image > Calculations, and this allows you to
combine two channels together to try to pull a composite.
| | 01:16 | So I'm going to take the Red Channel, and
I'll try maybe the Blue Channel because there
| | 01:21 | is some blue in her dress,
and we'll Invert that.
| | 01:24 | And now we just play with the Blending Modes,
and this doesn't always work, but it often
| | 01:29 | works and what we're trying to do is
create something where we get some separation so
| | 01:35 | that her hair is popping over the backdrop.
So that's actually pretty good on the hair part.
| | 01:40 | So I could do this in different passes.
| | 01:42 | So if I don't get what I want,
sometimes it's a matter of trial and error.
| | 01:47 | That's pretty good there, notice how
we're getting decent separation on the hair.
| | 01:52 | Now I can invert that and see, but I think
that's pretty good and so I'm going to click
| | 01:57 | OK to make my first Alpha Channel.
| | 02:00 | And if we look at the Channels pallet there it
is so we'll just simply do a Levels Adjustment.
| | 02:05 | What we're going to do here is
adjust it and pull that black slider in.
| | 02:11 | You see that we've got
pretty good whites for the hair.
| | 02:14 | Abba: Yeah, and this is a
challenging shot because of two reasons.
| | 02:18 | Her hair is very fine so you have a lot of
white showing through and her dress has white in it.
| | 02:22 | So that's why it's a little more
complex, but it's not impossible.
| | 02:25 | Rich: Yeah, so I'll click OK.
| | 02:27 | That looks pretty good, I'll grab the Brush
tool here and just paint out some of these spots.
| | 02:32 | And what I'm going for here is trying to get it so that
her feet and her legs and her hair are coming through.
| | 02:41 | So in this case it looks like I'm going to
get the hair and the skin but not the dress,
| | 02:45 | and that's okay, so we'll just touch up the
face a little bit, and it's looking pretty good.
| | 02:50 | This is one of those things where you could
be as perfectionist as you want, we're just
| | 02:54 | going to give you the broad strokes here,
and then you would step in and refine it a bit.
| | 02:58 | But that's my first Alpha Channel, so
as Alpha 1 let's go back and do it again.
| | 03:03 | This time we're going to do Calculations,
and we're going to try to get the dress.
| | 03:08 | So let's go with Green and Blue, which were
some of the colors of the dress, and we'll
| | 03:14 | try playing with some of our Modes here.
| | 03:17 | Now what we're trying to do is to get that
to stand out from the backdrop which is tough,
| | 03:22 | and it doesn't matter here if it's black or
white but I'm just going to play with different
| | 03:25 | combinations and potentially invert things
until I could see that I'm getting separation.
| | 03:31 | And if that doesn't work, but that's actually
getting there, I can click OK, and let's do
| | 03:36 | a Levels Adjustment there.
| | 03:38 | So we'll pull that in, and it's
tough here but we're getting it.
| | 03:44 | Abba: Yeah, your goal is to
make the dress white.
| | 03:47 | Rich: Yeah.
| | 03:48 | Abba: Because then when you blend that
with the other Alpha Channel she's going to be
| | 03:53 | completely white, so we'll be able
to make anything black transparent.
| | 03:56 | Rich: Yeah so that's looking pretty
good there, and we'll just finesse that.
| | 04:03 | I'll click OK, and I've got enough there to
work with that I can go ahead and select the dress.
| | 04:10 | So there we have it,
paintbrush, not too soft of an edge.
| | 04:19 | Abba: This is an act of patience, I mean
you can keep zooming in, and you are painting
| | 04:27 | out where her dress is but you
have a really good starting point.
| | 04:31 | Rich: Yeah, and this is just meant to be
refined, I mean you're not going to get it
| | 04:35 | perfect the first time out,
but this is complex masking.
| | 04:39 | Now, hopefully this is giving some of you
an appreciation to say, oh you know what,
| | 04:44 | I am going to buy a green
screen, but this is how it's done.
| | 04:48 | So in this case a white dress and a white
backdrop is pretty hard, but we're getting
| | 04:53 | what we need to there.
| | 04:54 | Abba: And I do want to point out that when
I took this picture my intent was not to do
| | 04:59 | it as a Chroma key or a green screen.
| | 05:03 | So that's why I shot it on a
nice generic white background.
| | 05:05 | Rich: Yeah, you were just going for a
simple elegant background but if you leave it to
| | 05:09 | clients some will always come back and say,
Oh that's such a plain backdrop, could you
| | 05:13 | put this back there?
| | 05:16 | and so that's where
sometimes green screen comes in.
| | 05:19 | So we're just about there, and you see we
have the dress and remember just a little
| | 05:26 | bit of trial and error.
| | 05:27 | So that's looking pretty good, we'll go ahead
and filter that a little bit so it's a little
| | 05:31 | softer, a gentle Gaussian Blur
will get rid of some of that noise.
| | 05:35 | I'll click OK, and I'll
click Levels Adjustment there.
| | 05:39 | We can now push the blacks to black.
I've got her dress on its own.
| | 05:44 | Notice I can contract it there pretty easily
and what we're going to do is combine those
| | 05:49 | two Alpha Channels together
to make a new Alpha Channel.
| | 05:52 | So we've got two Alpha
Channels with black and white.
| | 05:55 | This allows us to again do Calculations and
by the way, this is how Photoshop worked before
| | 06:00 | it had Layers, we used to
use the Calculations command.
| | 06:03 | So I could say take Alpha 1 and combine it
with Alpha 2 and by going to Screen mode which
| | 06:10 | drops out the blacks in Alpha 1, you
see we got a pretty good new layer there.
| | 06:15 | So I'll just say great, make a new Alpha
Channel called Alpha 3, and now it's just a matter
| | 06:20 | of a little of bit of touchup.
| | 06:21 | So you see how those two combined,
and you've got a decent mask.
| | 06:26 | Now you don't have to worry about
perfection here because once you've got a pretty good
| | 06:30 | selection, it's just a Ctrl-click
or Command-click on that to load it.
| | 06:34 | You can now turn off those alpha channels
and go back to the RGB and use that same Refine
| | 06:40 | Edge command that you saw earlier.
| | 06:43 | It'll analyze the image, we'll do a Smart Radius,
it's going to think about those edges and look at that.
| | 06:49 | Let's put that over another color besides
white so we could see it, there is black,
| | 06:55 | and there is transparent, and it looks to
me like there's just maybe a little small
| | 06:59 | touch up there, but what do you think?
| | 07:01 | Abba: I think it's pretty
good, it's pretty amazing.
| | 07:03 | Just a little touchup in the hair and a
little touchup on her skin tone and the legs, and
| | 07:07 | I think you're ready to rock and roll.
| | 07:08 | Rich: Yeah, so we'll just go ahead and say
Add a new layer mask, and I'll click OK, it
| | 07:14 | adds it and just zoom on in to the hair
area there where we have the problem zone.
| | 07:21 | And because the layer mask is selected with the
paintbrush there painting you could just restore.
| | 07:28 | This is where I would go back to a nice soft
brush and a few strokes will build that up.
| | 07:38 | Looks pretty good to me.
| | 07:42 | Abba: And I think you're
definitely getting there.
| | 07:44 | Rich: And we'll just fill in a
little bit here on the front of the dress.
| | 07:49 | There we go, and we have the little divot
of the legs, but that's a piece of cake.
| | 07:56 | Abba: Now Rich, sometimes do you put this
over colored background temporarily just so
| | 08:01 | you can see things differently or do you
usually stay with this transparency grid?
| | 08:05 | Rich: It's really up to
you in how you prefer to work.
| | 08:08 | This is one of those instances where
because it's a live layer mask I'm not that afraid
| | 08:13 | to get in there and tweak, and we don't even
know what part of the image we're going to use yet.
| | 08:17 | So, it's just a simple matter there
of switching between black and white.
| | 08:21 | So when you're satisfied with that, remember
earlier this was a Smart Object.
| | 08:25 | Abba: Absolutely.
Rich: Double-click, opens back up.
| | 08:29 | Abba: That's brilliant, and you can just bring
the Saturation right back down to where it should be.
| | 08:34 | Rich: Yeah, you don't
have to worry about the edges.
| | 08:35 | Abba: And on this one I like to pop the
Vibrance because the dress then gets brighter but her
| | 08:39 | skin tone stays pretty much in control.
| | 08:42 | Rich: Yeah, if that looks pretty good click OK,
and it updates, and you've got the better key.
| | 08:48 | So, a lot more work than in the green screen approach,
but an absolutely usable way to pull an extraction.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring third-party alternatives| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: All right, so Abba, you're a big fan
of third-party tools as well, and there are
| | 00:04 | some great ones out there for
keying. What's one of your favorites?
| | 00:07 | Abba Shapiro: Well, one of the ones I like to use is
onOne software, they have something called Perfect Mask.
| | 00:11 | You can either get it by itself or you can
buy it as a suite, but I like the fact that
| | 00:16 | it's easy, it's quick, and it
deals with translucency really well.
| | 00:19 | Rich: So in order to run this, this can't
be a Smart Object so I'll rasterize that layer
| | 00:24 | first, and then it's just
under the Automate Menu, right?
| | 00:27 | Abba: Right, when you install some third-party
software it's under the Filter Menus.
| | 00:31 | In this case, it's under Automate, and you
would go under Automate and select Perfect Mask.
| | 00:36 | Rich: We're just going to run this as a demo
here, you can download it and try it yourself.
| | 00:41 | It's going to prepare the image,
and it's going to take a look at it.
| | 00:43 | Now there are lots of controls, be sure to
head in over to the onOne site if you want
| | 00:46 | to take a look at all of these options.
| | 00:49 | But let's just jump in and do it pretty simple,
and we can go ahead under the BASIC tab here
| | 00:54 | and tell it to attempt to remove the background.
| | 00:57 | Now it's going to want us to
define something first, right?
| | 00:59 | Abba: Right, now the removing the background
is a challenge because we have so many different
| | 01:02 | colors in there, and this would be
good if you had a nice solid background.
| | 01:06 | So what we want to do is we want to click
on the Eraser tool, the second one down, and
| | 01:09 | just paint a little bit over the different shades
of green, and you don't have to be too precise here.
| | 01:16 | Go ahead and paint her over the darker green
also, and as you see it's doing a pretty good
| | 01:22 | job of pulling out these different shades.
| | 01:24 | Rich: Yeah, that's automatically
detecting the edges there, and it's done a nice job
| | 01:29 | of pulling out the key.
| | 01:32 | Now we can obviously take the rest of this
stuff out with just some simple masking, but
| | 01:36 | let's just see what happens if I paint over it
if it's going to be intelligent enough to grab it.
| | 01:42 | Pretty good, so it's just analyzing that
material and pulling it out and of course there is
| | 01:47 | the brush that allows us to
choose to what to keep, right?
| | 01:49 | Abba: Right, now there are a
couple of things, we're going to zoom in.
| | 01:52 | I want to make sure you kept the little bit
of green under her arm so you can either zoom
| | 01:57 | in or you can shrink your brush size.
| | 02:00 | Zooming in is usually what I like to do, and
it works pretty much the same as Photoshop,
| | 02:03 | holding down the Space key you can simply
move it around, and it's going to pick up
| | 02:07 | these green pixels, and as soon as you let go.
| | 02:10 | Now it did too much and what we want to
do is we want to tell it what to keep.
| | 02:14 | So we switch to the other tool, and we want
to paint over her skin, and now it analyzes it.
| | 02:20 | So it's a very quick way to pull a key, but
we have a challenge of where we do have some
| | 02:25 | edging, that we have some green on it and
in this case we want to make sure that it
| | 02:29 | becomes translucent as opposed to transparent.
| | 02:32 | And that did a pretty good job, but it kind of cut
it off so we're going to switch to another tool here.
| | 02:39 | So if you're in a situation, and let's step
back a couple of steps here, and we see we
| | 02:43 | do have a problem with the hair, and this
is something that happens all the time, it's
| | 02:47 | never a perfect world.
| | 02:50 | So what I want to do is I want to choose the
Magic Brush, and you won't see this initially
| | 02:54 | until you switch over to the ADVANCED tab,
and now you'll notice you have a lot more
| | 02:58 | tools to work with.
| | 03:01 | And if I slide my cursor over here you see
there's something called the Magic Brush,
| | 03:04 | and I can click on that and let me scale that
down and in size to have a little more control.
| | 03:09 | Now I'm going to actually tell it what
colors to keep and what colors to get rid of.
| | 03:14 | So I could go over here, and I can click on
the Keep Color icon, and I'm going to click
| | 03:19 | on her hair in different places because
there are different shades in her hair.
| | 03:26 | And then I can go to the minus, and I can
click on the green to tell it what to remove.
| | 03:33 | As you see over on the right side, it's
learning what I want to remove and what I want to keep.
| | 03:40 | Now once I've done that, we can go over,
and we can select our Magic Brush, and now as
| | 03:47 | we paint this out you'll notice that
her hair stays in and the green comes out.
| | 03:54 | And again, this is something you can go
select and keep re-tweaking, and you can also go
| | 04:00 | down here to the Chisel tool, and this is
just like working with maybe a block of wood,
| | 04:06 | we're going to go ahead and shrink that down,
and it just kind of chisels away very fine
| | 04:11 | that extra green element
that you're working with.
| | 04:15 | Now we're not going to go
through and do the entire image.
| | 04:18 | But as you can see, I can very quickly
clean up this green screen using this tool.
| | 04:25 | Rich: Yeah, so lots of options,
feel free to download that and play.
| | 04:29 | You can go ahead and continue to practice
on your own, and we're going to jump forward
| | 04:32 | and do some quick
compositing to give you some ideas.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Positioning the background with Free Transform| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: All right Abba, so there is the
cut-out version, let's sort of work this through.
| | 00:04 | There are lots of things that we can pull
off here, looks like she has something in
| | 00:08 | her hand there. Do you want to go
ahead and touch that up a little bit?
| | 00:10 | Abba Shapiro: Yeah, so we'll go ahead to the mask.
| | 00:12 | Rich: Yeah, and totally nondestructive here
so with black we could just go ahead and paint
| | 00:16 | that out, and that's probably the seam
of where the edge of the green screen was.
| | 00:21 | But that's the whole advantage
of those nondestructive masks.
| | 00:24 | So that's pretty good.
And you've put in a couple of backdrops here.
| | 00:28 | Now these particular backdrops
came with that onOne package.
| | 00:31 | There are lots of backdrops out there, you
saw some of the ones we processed earlier
| | 00:35 | that we used, and we're going to
use some of those with video projects.
| | 00:38 | So there's lots of ways to use in this, it's
totally up to you if you want to add another
| | 00:42 | one, you can choose File > Place, and this
allows you to go ahead and navigate out to
| | 00:47 | the images that you've prepped.
| | 00:49 | So there it is there is the alley, I'll hit
Place, and it drops it in and holding down
| | 00:54 | the Shift and the Alt or the Option key,
I could scale that a little bit if needed.
| | 00:58 | That looks pretty good, and we'll
just put that behind our subject.
| | 01:03 | So now we got a bunch of different options
to play with. And remember, Ctrl+T or Command+T
| | 01:09 | for Free Transform will let you adjust the
scale of the layers as necessary so you can
| | 01:15 | refine things. And you can also nudge things
left or right as needed, and I think that's
| | 01:19 | looking pretty good there
in that case, I'll apply it.
| | 01:22 | Abba: Yeah, now the key is finding the best
position for the background and the best position
| | 01:27 | for your cut out foreground to make
the shot have the balance that it needs.
| | 01:31 | I think we could move her
over to the left a little bit.
| | 01:34 | Rich: Okay, so we'll just do Ctrl+T or Command+T
for Free Transform, and we can nudge her as well.
| | 01:39 | Abba: This is nice, it gives me a little
breathing room behind her, not too much.
| | 01:43 | But that's good, she's giving me a
nice strong look, she's in the alley.
| | 01:47 | Now we need to do a couple of things to be
able to control, again depth of field or focal
| | 01:52 | point and to make her blend into the shot.
| | 01:55 | Rich: Yeah, so which
backdrop do you want to use?
| | 01:57 | I think, while I really like this one, I
think you were most happy with sort of this one
| | 02:03 | here for the parking garage look.
| | 02:06 | Abba: Yeah I really like this,
this is a kind of a grungier look.
| | 02:09 | And what really works for me is I really
like the way the lights are in the background,
| | 02:14 | and it seems to reflect upon her forehead so it
brings a little more reality to the composite.
| | 02:19 | Rich: All right, so when we come back we're
going to take a look at some actual compositing
| | 02:23 | things but I think we got
the position right here.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Matching color and exposure for the photo| 00:01 | Rich Harrington: We've got things pretty right,
but the color is not exactly there.
| | 00:04 | In this case, we could adjust the backdrop,
but I think the backdrop is right, and it's
| | 00:09 | our subject that should move towards it.
| | 00:11 | Abba Shapiro: I agree totally, I like the grunginess
and the darkness of the background, and it's
| | 00:15 | a little bit edgy and so I want to change
the way she looks to be a little darker, maybe
| | 00:19 | a little more contrastier, a little edgier to
kind of give us that tough soccer player feel.
| | 00:25 | Rich: Okay, so we've gone ahead and just
cloned out the logo, that's looking pretty good.
| | 00:29 | I'm going to select those two layers, and
we'll just merge those together as a Smart
| | 00:34 | Object by converting to Smart Object, and
we'll just call that Player, and that's going
| | 00:39 | to make it easier to keep
everything tied to the player on one layer.
| | 00:44 | Let's go with the Curves Adjustment and
use the great On Image tool there that allows
| | 00:48 | us to click and add a control point.
So I could start to pull things down.
| | 00:52 | Now you notice it's affecting everything,
so before we go any further I'm going to take
| | 00:57 | advantage of the ability to actually clip this.
| | 01:01 | So you notice if I click this button here it
indents, and it's only being applied to her.
| | 01:06 | So now it's very easy with that On Image
tool to make separate adjustments, and we can go
| | 01:11 | just after her and start to process that image.
| | 01:15 | Abba: And this is great because the trick
here is that there's something called, Matching
| | 01:20 | your Gammas which is a fancy way of making
sure that kind of your blacks all match, and
| | 01:25 | that the tone of the image matches, and
that's what really again sells the composite.
| | 01:29 | Rich: Yeah, and we'll just finesse that curve a
little bit there, I like that, that's looking pretty good.
| | 01:35 | We'll bring the Highlights up just a little
bit there for some higher contrast with that
| | 01:39 | lights hitting her face, and I think that
Curves Adjustment is really doing a pretty good job.
| | 01:44 | Is there anything you want different?
| | 01:46 | Abba: Can we work a little bit on the arm, I
think the skin tone could be a little redder,
| | 01:51 | she again is very fair skinned and isolate
that, maybe bring it a little darker and maybe
| | 01:56 | a little richer in color?
| | 01:57 | Rich: Okay, so we'll go ahead and just select
that layer, and we'll use the Quick Selection
| | 02:02 | tool to make a selection of the arm, and
that allows us to sort of get in there.
| | 02:08 | I don't have to be perfect here, that looks
good, and we'll do the same thing on the face,
| | 02:15 | and I'm happy with that, we'll just refine
that, and we can go ahead and Feather that
| | 02:20 | a bit so it's a gentle transition, and
we've got the arm selected, and I'll click OK.
| | 02:28 | Now with that selected we can add a Vibrance adjustment
and isolate that so it's only going after those areas.
| | 02:36 | So now as we adjust we're bringing some of
that in, and I think her arm is going to want
| | 02:42 | more than the face so we'll just simply
lower the face down here a little bit, we'll just
| | 02:47 | paint with a lower Opacity, and we'll paint
a little bit of black in there, so it's just
| | 02:53 | not as intense on the face
area, and it backs that down.
| | 02:57 | Is that working for you?
Abba: Yeah, that's much better.
| | 02:59 | She looks a lot tougher, as a matter of fact
if we went back to look at the original image
| | 03:03 | by itself you'd see that it's a lot different now than
it was, and it really just start fitting into this scene.
| | 03:10 | Rich: Yeah, so I think that we've got the
color matching and the exposure matching right.
| | 03:14 | I think what's left is to really do some
compositing with depth of field and perhaps a little bit
| | 03:20 | of shadows or hand painting.
Abba: That sounds great.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting focus in the background| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: Let's create some depth in the image
and where do you want it to fall off, Abba?
| | 00:06 | Abba Shapiro: Well, I think as we go further back in the
parking garage, I want to see that go out of focus.
| | 00:10 | Rich: All right, so a little trick I like
to do is select all and choose Copy Merged
| | 00:15 | which copies everything to my clipboard and
then paste, and then I get a flattened copy
| | 00:20 | on top, and we're going to call this Depth.
| | 00:24 | Now one of the best things about Photoshop
CS6 is the fact that it has a Tilt-Shift Blur,
| | 00:29 | which is kind of cool.
| | 00:31 | Otherwise you could use the Camera Lens Blur,
and you could actually go there to Lens Blur,
| | 00:36 | and you could create a Depth
Matte which works okay too.
| | 00:39 | So we'll just select that layer, and
we'll choose Filter > Blur > Tilt-Shift.
| | 00:44 | Now that's fine and what we want to do here
is rotate this, and we're going to position
| | 00:49 | this on the subject, so she's our center point.
| | 00:53 | And there is no need for anything to the right to be
blurred, so we'll just set that outside of the field there.
| | 01:02 | And now we could adjust this so it's at of
her arm there and then drag out this transition
| | 01:09 | zone, and that's going to create an area
that goes from focused to out of focus.
| | 01:15 | Abba: Now you can control how fuzzy or
how out of focus that gets pretty easily.
| | 01:20 | Rich: Oh absolutely, you get a great on
image feedback here so you can really crank it and
| | 01:24 | in this case we're going to take it down
a bit because I think it was too strong.
| | 01:28 | But that's doing a pretty good job of
creating some depth of field blurring, and I'm happy
| | 01:33 | with that except, I want to tweak the
angle here a little bit, because I want this to
| | 01:38 | be more in that back corner
and not in the foreground here.
| | 01:41 | So I want this area out of focus but
a little bit more of a transition here.
| | 01:44 | Abba: Absolutely.
| | 01:46 | Rich: And notice that you could actually
put some distortion into the blurred areas,
| | 01:51 | and that just does a little bit of displacement
and makes it look a little more photorealistic.
| | 01:55 | I like to play with that, and then you also
have some Boca if you want the bright areas
| | 02:00 | to start to bloom, and this allows you to
adjust which areas are going to start to bloom
| | 02:04 | out, so you see that that doorway
in the back is sort of blooming.
| | 02:08 | Abba: So I don't have to
buy that $2,000 lens anymore?
| | 02:11 | Rich: Yes, you can add Boca in post.
Now I still think the good lenses go a long way.
| | 02:16 | The other thing that we're going
to do here is turn on a Field Blur.
| | 02:21 | And this Field Blur put a little point here,
and I'm going to click to add a control point,
| | 02:25 | and this allows me to adjust.
| | 02:27 | So I could adjust here and set that to a blur
value of three and come up here with another
| | 02:32 | Field Blur and set that very low.
| | 02:36 | And what this allows you to do is start to
add pockets of what's in focus and what's
| | 02:41 | out of focus, and you can get very accurate
as you start to create here, and this allows
| | 02:47 | you to combine with the two
blurs to create more blurring.
| | 02:51 | So you see that's working pretty well, this
is the one that added on its own so I'll just
| | 02:55 | move that over, and I'll put that in the upper
corner there and so we actually have the Tilt-Shift
| | 03:01 | Blur plus some additional points that we've
manually applied, and I'll set that one down
| | 03:06 | to zero there and notice here that we
could just interactively create some blurring.
| | 03:12 | If you click on this here you can actually save
that off as a separate channel so you can modify it.
| | 03:18 | But you see how all those blurs are combining,
both the Tilt-Shift plus the Field Blur to
| | 03:23 | create some better pockets
of what's in and out of focus?
| | 03:26 | So I could just come down here and soften
that a little bit on the backside so that
| | 03:32 | we're drawing the attention more to her face,
so there's a subtle blur on the backside without
| | 03:37 | it looking too blurry or fake.
| | 03:39 | Abba: And that is one of the tricks is
that your eye naturally focuses to the sharpest
| | 03:43 | part of the image, and
we wanted to focus on her.
| | 03:46 | Rich: So I'll go ahead and check the High
Quality Box because we're quality freaks,
| | 03:51 | and that will generate that out.
When we click OK, there's the new blur.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining the composite| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: We're almost there, and what I want
to draw on are just a couple dirty tricks
| | 00:05 | to finish this out, to give it that look.
| | 00:07 | And so one of the first things I'm going to do is I'm
going to select the Background layer and duplicate it.
| | 00:11 | I'm just going to put a copy on top here of
that plate, and we're going to defocus that a bit.
| | 00:17 | So, it's just not so in focus here, a little
Gaussian Blur, or any of these will work fine.
| | 00:23 | We're just softening that a bit.
| | 00:28 | It's going to lay on top of our subject,
and we could just take that opacity down a bit
| | 00:34 | and look at how that's just matching the
color of the environment and her clothes are now
| | 00:39 | picking up some of those shadows and highlights.
| | 00:41 | Abba Shapiro: Yeah, It really makes her
look like she's in that garage.
| | 00:44 | Rich: Yeah, that's just a little trick of
sort of using the Background layer as a foreground
| | 00:48 | overlay, but you defocused that, which is a
good suggestion on your part, to make sure
| | 00:53 | that that doesn't get so photorealistic.
It just picks up the colors.
| | 00:57 | Now, one of my favorite tricks is a Black &
White Adjustment layer, and I'll just click
| | 01:02 | Auto and then use the On Image tool here to
adjust the individual areas by dragging, like
| | 01:08 | there it's using the Blues slider to
affect the uniform a bit, and I can go after the
| | 01:12 | skin tones separately there
to get the right contrast.
| | 01:16 | Once I get that, again, Blending Modes,
the secret is always Blending Modes.
| | 01:21 | So, I could select that,
and that's Overlay mode.
| | 01:23 | Now, it's a little bit strong, but with the
Move tool selected, Shift+Plus or Minus, will
| | 01:28 | let me step through the blending modes, and
you see that blending of Black & White copy
| | 01:33 | can give you that high
contrast look, cool spot color look.
| | 01:38 | Let's just go there.
That's a little gritty.
| | 01:41 | I think you probably want somewhere in
that realm there, and then we'll just back off
| | 01:46 | its opacity, so the effect is a little less.
| | 01:49 | But that's giving you that
higher contrast sort of grit.
| | 01:53 | Abba: Right, I like the fact that you were
able to use a keyboard shortcut to step through
| | 01:57 | all your different blending modes because
that's really much quicker than clicking and
| | 02:01 | selecting and clicking and selecting.
Rich: Yeah just go ahead and experiment.
| | 02:05 | We'll finish that out
with a little bit of a curve.
| | 02:07 | Let's do an Auto Curve to balance out the
image, a little strong there, but that's just
| | 02:11 | unifying it, and I think that looks
pretty good there, we've got a good contrast.
| | 02:15 | Abba: Yeah, to me, it looks
like she's actually in that garage.
| | 02:18 | Rich: Let's just finish this
off with a little power window.
| | 02:21 | We'll add a Gradient here.
Abba: I'd do this probably on 95% of my images.
| | 02:27 | I am a huge fan of having drop-offs through
the edge of the frame, whether it's like a
| | 02:32 | camera vignette or just a general
vignette, to me, it makes it pop.
| | 02:37 | Rich: Well, this is just a gradient
adjustment layer, going from transparent to black and
| | 02:41 | a lot of people don't realize, you can
click right in there and move it around.
| | 02:44 | So, it's a live effect, so we could position
that right on our subject, and we could adjust
| | 02:49 | the scale until we get the right sort of
edges that we want, and that looks pretty good.
| | 02:54 | I'll toggle that off and on, and that's just
guiding your eye again, right to the subject,
| | 02:59 | put that into Multiply mode, and we can lower the
Opacity a bit, and that's just a nice power window.
| | 03:07 | So, I think we've soled that, and if you take
a look all the way back to where we started,
| | 03:12 | there was our perfectly shot-fine green screen,
but we don't have obsess and then as we start
| | 03:18 | to light it and play with the depth of
field and map the color and some contrast and a
| | 03:24 | little bit of a vignette, all of a sudden,
it becomes a photorealistic composite.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Creating the Composite for MotionKeying in Premiere Pro| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: Now, Photoshop was pretty straightforward,
and I think it serves as a great foundation
| | 00:05 | for what comes next.
| | 00:06 | Abba Shapiro: Now, working with video is very
different than working with a still image and though
| | 00:11 | some of the techniques are similar,
it's kind of a whole different ball of wax.
| | 00:15 | Rich: Yeah, I think where the problem comes
is that it's such a lower resolution medium.
| | 00:19 | So, when you're dealing with a high-quality
raw file, you've got tremendous latitude.
| | 00:23 | You could recover the highlights or
bloom them, so you get a nice perfect key.
| | 00:28 | You can get in there and really refine edge
detail and things like clarity, to just pick
| | 00:32 | up those edges, it's perfect.
| | 00:34 | With the video, because of the way video
cameras work so much information is smashed and thrown
| | 00:38 | away, especially on a DSLR that it's like
you're working with a JPEG quality one photo,
| | 00:44 | when it comes the time to do the key.
| | 00:46 | Abba: Absolutely, and not only is the
quality worse because of the compression, but even
| | 00:50 | the size of the image.
| | 00:51 | The highest of high-def televisions are only
1920x1080, that's less than 2 megapixels.
| | 00:56 | Rich: Yeah, that's practically nothing,
and you deal with the fact that you don't have
| | 01:00 | to just make a single frame look good.
| | 01:02 | You could be dealing with hundreds, if not
thousands of frames, and as the subject moves
| | 01:07 | around--come on move around with me--as they
move around, it gets difficult. So we could
| | 01:11 | stop now we're making them dizzy. But as the move
around, they turn their head, the light hits
| | 01:16 | differently, they start waving their hands in
the green screen space, and you get vibrations.
| | 01:20 | You can get these areas
that just don't key very well.
| | 01:23 | So, when it comes to keying video,
it's a lot harder than keying photos.
| | 01:26 | We're going to take a look at
a couple of techniques here.
| | 01:29 | There are really sort of two schools of
thought, one is do it in the compositing tool, the
| | 01:34 | other is do it the editing tool.
What's the logic there?
| | 01:38 | Abba: Well, for a lot of folks, they're uncomfortable
with jumping into, what they call a higher-end
| | 01:43 | tool, like After Effects.
They're a little afraid.
| | 01:45 | They may know their Editing tool, but they
look at After Effects, and it's really scary.
| | 01:49 | Kind of like the first time that
somebody ever looks at Photoshop.
| | 01:51 | Rich: Yeah.
| | 01:52 | Abba: Now, once you know Photoshop, it's
like, I know exactly where everything is.
| | 01:56 | So, they like that comfort zone and a lot
of the editing tools out there, actually have
| | 02:01 | relatively good keyers built in, but sometimes,
you really need to take it to the next level
| | 02:06 | to make that key look good.
| | 02:07 | Rich: Well, I kind of liken it to the
Lightroom and Photoshop relationship, which is you could
| | 02:12 | do great processing of images within Lightroom.
You don't necessarily need layers.
| | 02:17 | You can get in and do a really good image.
| | 02:19 | However, at some point, if you want to
take it to the absolute level, you're going to
| | 02:23 | kick that photo over to Photoshop and do more
with it, and you're going to start to do some
| | 02:27 | extra processing and layering, especially if
it was a composite image because you couldn't
| | 02:31 | just pull that off inside of Lightroom.
It's a lot like that in an editing tool.
| | 02:35 | With video editing, you can do some basic
keying, but some of the advanced tasks like
| | 02:39 | blurring or relighting
the scene just aren't there.
| | 02:42 | But to make it easier for you, we're going
to take a look at a couple of popular video
| | 02:45 | tools and show you some standard
workflows that make keying a lot easier.
| | 02:51 | So Abba, before we get into complex
compositing, let's do something that just about anybody
| | 02:56 | can do, and that is key video inside
a non-linear or video editing tool.
| | 03:00 | Abba: So, we're going to use Premiere Pro because
you probably already have it, if you have the suite.
| | 03:05 | So, you might as well go and use that.
| | 03:07 | Now, the same techniques that we're using
in this non-linear editing program, will work
| | 03:11 | in any other non-linear editing
program that has a built-in keyer.
| | 03:15 | Rich: So essentially, you're going to put the
footage on top of the backdrop that you want to key.
| | 03:21 | I'll typically load up the green screen clip,
and then I would find the part of the clip
| | 03:26 | I wanted to use, and you would just mark out
an in and an out point to define that range.
| | 03:31 | That's pretty straightforward.
| | 03:32 | We're going to use this portion of the clip,
and I want to target that to go to a higher
| | 03:38 | track, in this case, Video track 2 because
that's where it's going to go, above everything else.
| | 03:44 | Now this video clip, that we're giving you,
doesn't have audio, that's because you don't
| | 03:47 | need audio for purposes of the exercises.
Your real video would probably have some audio.
| | 03:52 | I will just edit that in.
| | 03:54 | So, now that it's on the top track, we just
need to add something down below and in that
| | 03:59 | case we have a simple backdrop.
| | 04:01 | Abba: So, you just need to bring your track
targeting back to Track 1, like you did before,
| | 04:07 | again, marking in and out,
and bring it into the timeline.
| | 04:10 | Rich: So, we can go ahead
and define that range there.
| | 04:13 | Abba: You did that by just going and
marking an in and out point in the timeline?
| | 04:17 | Rich: Yeah, I and O for in and
out or you can use the buttons there.
| | 04:21 | There are many ways, but most editing tools use
the same convention of I and O for in and out.
| | 04:27 | If you want to know more about video
editing tools, actually there's a wealth of online
| | 04:31 | training here at lynda.com.
| | 04:32 | You've got classes on both
Final Cut X and Premiere Pro.
| | 04:36 | I've got classes on Final
Cut Express and Premiere Pro.
| | 04:39 | So, it's very easy if you want
to learn more about these tools.
| | 04:42 | Just go ahead and take
advantage of your membership.
| | 04:44 | Abba: That's a good point because
obviously, we're going very quickly here.
| | 04:47 | We're not here to teach you how to video edit,
we're here to teach you how the compositing
| | 04:51 | part of video editing works.
So, don't sweat it.
| | 04:54 | If it seems to be going fast, take a look at those other
titles, and you can really refine those skills.
| | 04:59 | Rich: So, we'll go ahead, and we'll patch
that in with an overwrite edit, and you basically
| | 05:04 | see, we have a two clip sandwich there and
what it is, is the green screen footage on
| | 05:09 | top of the backdrop that we want to key.
| | 05:12 | Now, the first step here is to pull off a
good key and our footage has a nice even green
| | 05:18 | background, it's fairly rich, but if your
footage has any problems, you can go ahead
| | 05:24 | and apply a little bit of a
saturation adjustment first.
| | 05:27 | So, some people find it useful to put a
little bit of a saturation adjustment on their clip
| | 05:33 | ahead of time and they'll then boost that
just a bit, so the green is nice and vibrant.
| | 05:38 | In that case, it did, but it's
also affecting our skin tones here.
| | 05:42 | I don't think we use it, but
that's an idea if you need it.
| | 05:45 | Premiere Pro does have a keyer
included with it, and it is called.
| | 05:49 | Abba: The Alter Key. As a matter of fact, the fastest way
to find anything is simply type the first few letters
| | 05:54 | of what you're looking for in the dialog
box, it will automatically find it for you.
| | 05:58 | Rich: So, there it is, and we'll
drag it on and nothing happened. Why?
| | 06:03 | Abba: Well, all you did
was drag the filter on.
| | 06:06 | Now, you need to adjust it.
| | 06:07 | It doesn't do all the work for
you, but it's pretty intuitive.
| | 06:10 | So, we need to make sure that if the clip
is not loaded back into the source monitor,
| | 06:15 | you load it in, and you switch over to the
Effects Control tab, and you should see the
| | 06:19 | Alter key as one of the items inside this panel.
| | 06:23 | Rich: Yeah, If necessary just
twirl it down and grab the Eyedropper.
| | 06:27 | Now, other tools are going to have different
keying plug-ins, but they always start with
| | 06:32 | you, taking an eyedropper and
selecting something that's green.
| | 06:35 | I usually go right next to the ear because
that's got both skin and hair in it, and it's
| | 06:41 | going to be a good idea
for the green, and we click.
| | 06:44 | You see, it did pretty well,
but not perfect, right?
| | 06:47 | We obviously have a few problems left.
| | 06:48 | Abba: As a matter of fact, this is usually
the case, no matter how well you light something,
| | 06:53 | it's going to give you an okay transparency,
but this is where a couple of tweaks will
| | 06:59 | take it from, eh to absolutely great.
| | 07:03 | Rich: Yeah, this problem is really easy
to be exaggerated here because of the highly
| | 07:07 | compressed nature that we shot this on DSLR.
So, it's introducing more noise.
| | 07:12 | Most keying tools will have the ability for
you to view the Matte or the Alpha Channel,
| | 07:16 | and this makes it easy to see what's happening.
| | 07:19 | So, there is our wrinkle in our backdrop and
here's a hotspot from the light, and I'm just
| | 07:23 | going to go to the Matte Generation and the
Matte Cleanup areas, and this allows me to adjust.
| | 07:29 | So, we can play with the Highlight
slider and the Shadow slider a little bit.
| | 07:34 | Abba: Now, your goal here is to make
whatever you want to be transparent, solid black, and
| | 07:40 | whatever you want to be
laid on top to be solid white.
| | 07:43 | I kind of try to think of this as if I
threw her picture at this image, she would stick
| | 07:49 | to the white part and the black
would just fall off into space.
| | 07:52 | Rich: Yeah, we're playing off here just a
little bit, playing with things like Tolerance,
| | 07:57 | and we want to be careful there.
| | 07:59 | We're getting a little noise so I'm going
to soften that a bit and again, when dealing
| | 08:04 | with some footage types, like DSLR that are
heavily compressed, you may have to play a
| | 08:08 | little bit to get that balance.
| | 08:11 | That's looking pretty good, and
we'll just finish that out there.
| | 08:14 | Let's play with play with the Shadows, and I have
to be careful that I don't get too much of her hair.
| | 08:20 | Abba: Now, one of the things that may
happen is if you notice in the bottom right-hand
| | 08:25 | corner, you are getting a little bit more
of the green becoming translucent instead
| | 08:31 | of transparent, but that's easy enough
to fix with a Mask or a Garbage Matte.
| | 08:36 | Rich: Yeah, she never actually crosses that
area so that's going to be a piece of cake.
| | 08:39 | So, we will apply a Garbage Matte next.
| | 08:41 | Got a little problem there next to her face,
so let's just play, and we'll just tighten
| | 08:46 | that up a little bit.
| | 08:47 | You see, as you play with things like Contrast,
like the Shadows, like the Tolerance, that
| | 08:53 | you're able to clean the details up.
| | 08:55 | With just a little bit of work, that works pretty well.
Abba: There we go.
| | 09:00 | Rich: I'll soften that a bit more, and
let's switch that back to the composite.
| | 09:11 | We're almost there.
| | 09:12 | We have a little problem there in the side
of her hair, picking up some of the green,
| | 09:16 | so it's partially transparent, but its close.
| | 09:19 | This is one of the problems that often
exist with NLEs, especially when you're dealing
| | 09:24 | with highly compressed footage is that,
it's really a give and take game until you get
| | 09:29 | that right balance.
That's looking pretty good.
| | 09:31 | I'm going to get it to the hair is right,
and then we're just going to lop that off
| | 09:34 | with the Garbage Matte, like you were
saying because that area is not problematic.
| | 09:39 | Abba: I just want to revisit something we
talked about earlier on in the class, and
| | 09:43 | that is shooting with DSLRs,
the color is highly compressed.
| | 09:48 | As a matter of fact, a lot of the color
information is thrown away, which is why it makes a key,
| | 09:52 | a little more challenging
to do in a non-linear editor.
| | 09:55 | Rich: Yeah, that's why people
will often use other footage.
| | 09:58 | That's looking pretty good there.
| | 09:59 | We used the Garbage Matte to just sort of
draw the edges, and I applied the Garbage
| | 10:04 | Matte effect, and I just dragged the
individual points that make it pretty easy.
| | 10:09 | As we drag through, you
see we've got a decent key.
| | 10:12 | Now, not a perfect key, but a decent key, and you
want to look at it in motion, not when it's paused.
| | 10:18 | We see that it's keying,
she's over her backdrop.
| | 10:21 | This is about as good as you'll
typically get in a video editing tool.
| | 10:26 | These are often called Placeholder Keys
because unless you're using dedicated third-party
| | 10:30 | software or you're shooting on a much
higher quality format, things like DV, HDV, DSLR,
| | 10:38 | can be problematic, and you might see
some spillover like we're getting there.
| | 10:42 | But I like that, I've cleaned that edge up
pretty well, and I'll just go ahead and render
| | 10:46 | that quickly, and we'll get a good
idea of how that's going to work.
| | 10:50 | Abba: Now, that looks pretty
good, but you did a lot of work.
| | 10:54 | Sometimes, you can't quite get it that
clean or sometimes you're really under a crunch,
| | 10:59 | and you're not going to take it
into After Effects to clean it up.
| | 11:01 | One of the great tricks, when doing a green
screen key is selecting the right background.
| | 11:06 | Now, you created a background here that
really makes her pop, but if I had to hide those
| | 11:12 | green edges, I would probably key her
over something with a green background.
| | 11:16 | Rich: Yeah, we can do that here.
| | 11:18 | One of the things is, is you can always look
at that Alpha Channel and tighten it up, but
| | 11:23 | you're right, if you want to give up or you
want to go ahead and just swap it out, it's
| | 11:27 | not that hard to drop in another element.
| | 11:30 | So, we do have a green background and what
we can do is swap that out and obviously,
| | 11:39 | if we take a look at that, it can be much
more forgiving, going over a green backdrop.
| | 11:47 | There's lots of ways of dealing with that.
| | 11:49 | I would tend to work with this a little bit
more, but you've got a lot of choices here.
| | 11:54 | Now, we've pushed that.
We've been fighting.
| | 11:56 | I'm just going to take this from the top nice
and clean and show you how I would do it one
| | 12:00 | more time because I think what often happens
here, and this is common with keying is you
| | 12:05 | start to fight with it, and you start to
twiddle in the you end that going too far.
| | 12:08 | Let's go with a simple thing here.
| | 12:10 | From the top, we're going to put a little
bit of color in there, take advantage of the
| | 12:15 | Three-Way Color Corrector, and this
will allow you a little bit more control.
| | 12:19 | So, if you look at the Three-Way Color
Corrector, you'll see that you have separate controls
| | 12:24 | here, including the ability to put
saturation and just the highlights.
| | 12:29 | In this case, notice, I'm boosting the brightest areas,
and that's actually affecting the background more.
| | 12:36 | We'll put a little bit in the mid tones as well.
| | 12:39 | So, if we toggle that off and on,
you'll see that the background is greener.
| | 12:44 | Now, we'll go ahead and finish that out
with the key and take the Eyedropper and click,
| | 12:54 | view the matte, in this case called an Alpha
Channel, and then work with the Matte Cleanup
| | 13:00 | in the Spill Suppression.
| | 13:02 | Spill Suppression is going to remove some
of the green that's falling onto her face,
| | 13:07 | so you can play with that.
| | 13:10 | Notice here, by playing with the
contrast that cleans a whole bunch of that up.
| | 13:16 | In the Mid Point, I was
able to actually go pretty far.
| | 13:23 | A lot of times, you'll sort of lose the forest for
the trees because you start fiddling with every slider.
| | 13:28 | So, if it's just not working, start over.
| | 13:30 | Abba: Yeah, I often and sometimes
just reset and start from the beginning.
| | 13:33 | Now, Premiere Pro has a
really cool feature here in that
| | 13:37 | if you look under Setting, you'll see it
says, Custom because you've moved some dials.
| | 13:42 | But if you want to try, you can step through
Default, Relaxed, and Aggressive, and it will
| | 13:48 | give you different variations of your key, and
you might not have to do any extra work at all.
| | 13:54 | Rich: Aggressive did pretty well
there actually and yeah, a good call.
| | 13:58 | And we'll just bump the shadows a little bit.
| | 14:00 | Now, let's take a look at
that and look, much better.
| | 14:06 | So there, we do have a good key.
| | 14:10 | That hotspot you're seeing three is actually
on the backdrop, and that looks really good,
| | 14:14 | even if she's turning her head.
| | 14:16 | So, this is about as good as it gets in
the NLE, and this is why we do call this as a
| | 14:19 | Placeholder key and why we now want to
move on over to Adobe After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Keying in After Effects| 00:01 | Rich Harrington: So Abba, we have jumped into
After Effects here and same rules apply.
| | 00:04 | If you're completely brand new to After Effects,
there is After Effects Essential Central Training
| | 00:08 | here on lynda.com and several
other classes on After Effects.
| | 00:12 | Today, we just want to focus on the keying part.
| | 00:14 | So, don't worry if After Effects
itself looks a little bit difficult.
| | 00:19 | What we've done here is we've simply put
the two layers on top of each other, much like
| | 00:23 | we did in the NLE Program.
| | 00:25 | I've got one of our backdrops here, and I've got an
image, but you've already got a starting project here.
| | 00:31 | So, that's what we're just going to work with,
where those two images have been sandwiched
| | 00:33 | together and ready to go.
| | 00:35 | Abba Shapiro: What I like about this is that, After
Effects Keyer is so much more powerful than
| | 00:40 | the keyer that I find in almost
any other non-linear editing program.
| | 00:43 | Rich: Well, the one we're going to use is
called Keylight, and it's built-in with the
| | 00:46 | After Effects, and it's been used on major
Hollywood films and actually has a couple
| | 00:50 | of Academy Awards for its technology as well.
| | 00:53 | Let's go ahead, and we'll start with the Effects &
Presets, and I'm going to type in the word key for keying.
| | 00:59 | What you'll find here is that
there's a preset called green blur.
| | 01:02 | So, I'll go ahead and drop it on the layer
and what it does is it applies a little bit
| | 01:07 | of blur in the Green Channel
to get rid of some of the noise.
| | 01:11 | That's just going to help smooth out some
of the compression issues that we sometimes
| | 01:14 | have with our footage.
So, it looks pretty good.
| | 01:17 | And then I'm going to go a step further, and
I'm going to apply a Vibrance adjustment just
| | 01:22 | like we saw in Photoshop earlier.
This allows me to go ahead and push the colors.
| | 01:26 | For example, if I adjust the Vibrance,
notice how that green just gets so rich, but her
| | 01:32 | skin tones really haven't been that affected
because Vibrance ignores skin tones and goes
| | 01:38 | after the other areas first.
| | 01:39 | Abba: Now, that green really pops, so it's
going to be much easy to separate that and
| | 01:44 | differentiate that from her
skin tone, as well as her clothes.
| | 01:47 | Rich: So now that we've got that, we'll go
ahead and grab Keylight from the Keying category
| | 01:53 | and just drop it on.
| | 01:56 | Same thing, take the Eyedropper, click
somewhere near the ear, and as I first click, that was
| | 02:04 | a better first click.
| | 02:05 | Abba: Yeah, that's pretty impressive.
Rich: But it's not actually perfect.
| | 02:10 | You'd be prone to stuff here like,
"I'm done" but you're not actually done.
| | 02:13 | The same rules, you want to go in and take
a look under the View menu and take a look
| | 02:18 | at the Matte, and there are
some of the same problems.
| | 02:22 | They're not just as bad as they were in the
NLE, but there is the seam of our backdrop.
| | 02:27 | Abba: And then I noticed right at the hair line,
that we're losing a little bit of transparency
| | 02:32 | and her eyes are a little bit green, too.
So we actually have to deal with that.
| | 02:36 | Rich: Yeah, so we'll just take advantage here.
| | 02:38 | We'll play a little bit, generally with
things like clipping the black, and that's going
| | 02:43 | to take the things that are light gray and
make them pure black, and then I'll clip the
| | 02:48 | white a little bit and look how that just
picked up that area in her hair and her eyes,
| | 02:54 | plus you've got a great slider here that I
always laugh because people mispronounce,
| | 02:59 | but it's Despot, not despit.
| | 03:03 | There is no evil ruler here, but we can go
ahead and despot the black spots, and you
| | 03:08 | see that that just took her little eyes there.
| | 03:11 | If we look really close, for those of you
wandering what we're talking about, you see
| | 03:14 | right there that her eyes are
reflecting green a little bit.
| | 03:17 | She has greenish eyes, right?
| | 03:18 | Abba: Right, which means you'd actually
see a hole through her head, so it would be a
| | 03:23 | despot evil person as
supposed to de-spotting her eyes.
| | 03:27 | Rich: So we'll just despot the black
spots there, and it looks pretty good, a little
| | 03:31 | bit of fringe there on the head, and this is
where we want to play with things like Softness.
| | 03:36 | So, a little softness, we'll round that out,
and I'll play a little bit with the Balance
| | 03:42 | here, finding the right spot. That looks pretty good.
And let's just expand that a little.
| | 03:52 | There's my Softness, good.
| | 03:54 | We'll clip the white, and that fills it in well.
Let's just continue that. It looks pretty good.
| | 04:01 | I'll clip the black, and we can switch that
over to the final image, and you see that's
| | 04:09 | looking pretty good, not perfect, but we've got
some other things that we can do here to refine that.
| | 04:14 | We'll just finish out here with Keylight
before we switch over to lighting tricks.
| | 04:18 | To do that, I'll take advantage of Edge
Color Correction and Foreground Color Correction,
| | 04:25 | and what these are going to allow me to do
is to make sure that, for example, there's
| | 04:29 | a little bit of green spill on the side of her face,
even though we were careful about getting too close.
| | 04:35 | So, I can adjust that there and pull the
Saturation down a bit, and if I twirl down Edge Color
| | 04:42 | Suppression, note it's colored with
a hue because it's a British plug-in.
| | 04:46 | I could choose Green and what that's going
to do is suppress some of that green spill
| | 04:52 | at the very edge of her face.
| | 04:54 | So now she's not that that
green caste on the side of her face.
| | 04:58 | It's a little tricky, but it actually works
there, and it removes some of that color fringe
| | 05:03 | that you might see.
| | 05:04 | Abba: What it's really doing is it's
turning it more into a gray, as suppose to a green,
| | 05:08 | so you really don't see it in the shot.
| | 05:10 | Rich: And then we can do Foreground Color
Correction, and this allows us to actually
| | 05:15 | address the overall exposure of the shot,
so she matches the backdrop, because remember
| | 05:20 | in this case, it's outdoor, so it's a little
bit brighter than what it was in the studio.
| | 05:24 | I could saturate her a little bit, so she looks
a little bit more, like she's getting that color.
| | 05:29 | Of course, we could take advantage of
any other Color Correction tools, too.
| | 05:33 | And you've got a full color wheel, if you
need to go ahead and balance out the color.
| | 05:38 | And it's really pretty easy there,
to go ahead and really fix things.
| | 05:42 | I can go ahead and roll that until
she's got the right sort of color, overall.
| | 05:48 | Let's just push that a little bit more
towards the skin tones there or the orange of the
| | 05:52 | sunlight that she'd be under.
| | 05:53 | Abba: Now, I might pull down the saturation of
the red just because it's so bright, especially
| | 05:58 | for broadcast, it may push it over the edge,
and I don't want to be focusing on the backdrop.
| | 06:05 | I really want to focus on her.
| | 06:06 | Rich: So, a simple Vibrance adjustment there
on there on the background will work nicely.
| | 06:11 | There we go, and let's just pull that down,
and we'll adjust its exposure, darken that
| | 06:22 | up a little bit, and that's
darker and knocked down a bit.
| | 06:29 | Then it's very easy to just simply do
something like your Standard Curves Adjustment that
| | 06:34 | you would use in Photoshop and pull down
those shadows a little bit, and you start to get
| | 06:40 | what you're going for there.
| | 06:41 | So, lots of things we can work with, but we're
actually going to go a step further in another
| | 06:44 | movie here and completely relight the scene,
but as far as Keying goes, that looks pretty good.
| | 06:50 | She's keyed over the backdrop and she's
got the color, she's matching it, and I think
| | 06:54 | it's a pretty good start.
| | 06:54 | Abba: Yeah, nice clean edges, and
that's one of the best places to start.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Positioning the background in Z space| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: So Abba, one of the main advantages of After Effects
is that it introduces a concept called the Z axis.
| | 00:07 | Some of our viewers are now having flashbacks
to high school geometry, but for the rest
| | 00:11 | of them, what's the benefit of the Z axis?
| | 00:13 | Abba Shapiro: Well, it actually lets you give
three dimensions to two-dimensional objects.
| | 00:18 | So, we actually have her on a separate
layer than the background, wouldn't it be great
| | 00:23 | if we can create some artificial space so
that if we throw the lights on it, we get
| | 00:27 | shadows, and we can control depth of field?
It lets us turn a 2D world into a 3D world
| | 00:33 | and make a more realistic key.
Rich: I'm going to do just that.
| | 00:37 | We're going to make both of these 3D layers,
by clicking the Cube icon there, and if you
| | 00:41 | don't see that, there's a little switch at
the bottom that says, Toggle Switches/Modes,
| | 00:45 | that you can turn off and on, so you go ahead
and turn those on, but we just made it a 3D layer.
| | 00:50 | So, when I do that, I could press P for
position, and I have the X, Y, and Z axis.
| | 00:56 | So, this allows me to go ahead and
push the wall further away on the Z axis.
| | 01:01 | Now, the thing is it's hard to
tell when you look at it flat on.
| | 01:05 | Abba: Yeah, It looks like it's shrinking to me.
| | 01:07 | Rich: So, I'll go to two views and in one
of the views here, I set this to Custom View 1,
| | 01:13 | which is 45 degrees to
the left and 45 degrees up.
| | 01:17 | So, I'm sort of looking down at my set, and
you can kind of see what's happening there,
| | 01:22 | which is that we have our subject, and I could create
a relative distance of how far away she is from the wall.
| | 01:30 | Of course, you did say, it looks like it's
smaller, you could always scale that up a
| | 01:33 | little bit if you need to, and that works well.
| | 01:36 | Now I'm just pressing the Comma key there to
zoom in and out, but you can sort of see here,
| | 01:41 | this is looking at it head on,
and here it is from the side.
| | 01:44 | So now is it easier to see that Z axis?
| | 01:46 | Abba: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I would find it
impossible to work in the position on the right side,
| | 01:52 | but seeing the Z axis on the left side, I kind of
have a pretty good idea of what you're going to do.
| | 01:56 | Rich: So we've got some distance there.
| | 01:58 | We've got a sense of
perspective, and that really helps.
| | 02:01 | Now that we've created some separation, we
can actually go ahead and add some lighting
| | 02:07 | to really start to process this and
complete the look of adding depth and perspective.
| | 02:12 | Abba: And I love that idea because when we
shoot something we lighted both the background
| | 02:17 | and the foreground, but the lights have to
match, and it has to look realistic, and that's
| | 02:22 | one of the really nice things
that After Effects allows you to do.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Enhancing the image with digital lighting| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: All right, what I want to do here
is relight the scene and to give you a sense
| | 00:05 | of perspective of what we're going for. I've
already done an example of this, and I'm going
| | 00:10 | to open it up, and it's kind of
dramatically different, right?
| | 00:13 | Abba Shapiro: Yeah, I mean, I see
actual angle perspective.
| | 00:16 | I'm already starting to feel some depth.
| | 00:18 | Rich: Yeah, we've done that a couple of ways
here, and we're going to walk through all of that.
| | 00:22 | We've actually added a Camera, and we've
added two lights, and we've cast shadows and all
| | 00:27 | sorts of things, plus just to give you a
little sneak peak, you can actually put a little
| | 00:32 | bit of motion on that camera.
| | 00:35 | While this is flat objects because we've
got some separation between the two, what you
| | 00:39 | have got there is an effect called Parallax,
which is because the objects are further away
| | 00:43 | from each other, as the camera moves, it feels
a little bit more realistic like we're moving
| | 00:48 | around her here on location.
| | 00:50 | Abba: Yeah, I like the fact that literally,
the background is changing perspective than
| | 00:54 | the foreground, and that makes it real to
me, as opposed to if I was just with a flat
| | 00:59 | object, doing a move on it.
| | 01:01 | Rich: Yeah, so let's go ahead and build
this up, now that you see what's possible, and
| | 01:06 | we'll open up lights, which already
has her keyed, and we're going to start.
| | 01:10 | Now, the first thing we're going to add is a
3D camera, so we have a sense of perspective.
| | 01:15 | This is going to drive things as we work.
| | 01:17 | We'll animate this camera
later, but don't be intimidated.
| | 01:21 | There's a whole bunch of presets here that
just basically signify the lens length, like
| | 01:25 | you're used to seeing in a DSLR, so, a 35-millimeter
lens, a 50-millimeter lens, I'll
| | 01:30 | go with the 35-millimeter, which is pretty
typical, and I'm going to Enable Depth of
| | 01:35 | Field, which will allow the
background to fall out of focus later.
| | 01:38 | Abba: So, this is actually giving me a natural feel,
as if I have put a lens on a camera and shot my screen.
| | 01:45 | Rich: Yeah, when we did that, notice how it
affected the apparent distance to the background
| | 01:50 | because of the 35-millimeter lens.
| | 01:52 | If I change that, and I go to a 50-millimeter
preset, you're going to see that the Depth
| | 01:57 | of Field looks completely different, and
that's because different lens lengths will simulate
| | 02:03 | how the Depth of the Field, what happens if
it compresses the foreground or the background?
| | 02:06 | Abba: So, it's the same rules that
we're used to using in photography.
| | 02:09 | If you use a 200-millimeter lens, it's going
to flatten everything out, and you use
| | 02:13 | a 20-millimeter lens, and it's going to separate
everything and create a lot of false distance.
| | 02:18 | Rich: Yeah, so, there's a
28-millimeter versus the 35.
| | 02:22 | Now obviously, in this case, we have to be
careful because her arms end at the edge of that screen.
| | 02:27 | As I make changes there, we don't want to
make our subject look like she's cut off,
| | 02:31 | but that looks pretty good.
| | 02:32 | I've got my background there, and I could
always come up here and just grab the handles
| | 02:37 | on it and move it around a
bit, but I like that there.
| | 02:40 | I'm going to go ahead with that nice
texture and adjust the size just a little bit, and
| | 02:45 | I like that graffiti there, it's working nicely.
But what I want to do is light the scene.
| | 02:51 | So, when you're dealing with light, Abba, what do
you call the sort of base level light in a location?
| | 02:57 | Abba: The ambient light.
| | 02:58 | Rich: Right, same thing here, so the first
light we add is going to be an Ambient Light.
| | 03:03 | What this is going to do is define the
overall lighting levels for the room.
| | 03:08 | So, I'm going to lower that about 65% to start,
and you see that the whole scene gets darker.
| | 03:15 | This is because if we're going to add directional
light, we don't want to overpower the subject,
| | 03:20 | so we make it darker, so we
could then make it brighter.
| | 03:22 | Abba: It's the same thing again,
like as in still photography.
| | 03:25 | You really notice the lights of the room when
you're using strobes because they're so much brighter.
| | 03:28 | Rich: Yeah, that's what we did
here, we just knocked it down.
| | 03:32 | So I'm going to go ahead and press Return
or Enter with that light selected, so I could
| | 03:35 | name that, and I'll just call that Ambient,
making it easier to know what I'm doing, and
| | 03:40 | we'll add one more light, and this is going
to be a spotlight, and the spotlight is going
| | 03:47 | to start out with white, and we'll click OK, and it
adds it, and you see the little virtual light there.
| | 03:53 | In fact, it looks a little bit
like there's a soft box on it.
| | 03:56 | Abba: That's pretty cool.
| | 03:58 | I'm seeing her lit, as well as the background,
and it's a natural fall-off, but as it gets
| | 04:03 | further back that that spotlight gets larger
on the back wall, but not quite as large on her.
| | 04:10 | Rich: Yeah, that's looking pretty
good, and I could point that light.
| | 04:14 | With it selected there, I could grab this
little thing, that's going to adjust its point
| | 04:17 | of interest, and that works well.
| | 04:20 | If I twirl this light setting down, you'll
see lots of properties under Light Options,
| | 04:25 | including the ability to adjust the size of
the cone, so we can spot that up or open it,
| | 04:33 | and I'm going to just move its position off
to the side a little bit, and what that's going
| | 04:38 | to do is create a little bit more of a sense of
lighting that matches the original light of my scene.
| | 04:45 | In fact, I'm going to move this light, so
it's up a little bit and coming off from the
| | 04:49 | side because what am I trying to match?
| | 04:52 | Abba: You're trying to match the original shot that we
took, because there are two things that are happening here.
| | 04:57 | First of all, yes, we're relighting the scene,
but we're not really creating shadows on her
| | 05:01 | face, so you don't get the nose shadows,
and you don't get the highlights, you're just
| | 05:05 | getting brighter and darker areas.
| | 05:07 | So you really want to match the lighting
that you used when you shot it, and you want to
| | 05:11 | simulate that same lighting on the
background plate that we created.
| | 05:16 | Rich: Yeah, this is working
nicely, and I can adjust that.
| | 05:19 | I can also try to simulate the sun,
depending upon what we did, but that looks good.
| | 05:23 | We've got the higher keylight coming
in there across the side of here face.
| | 05:28 | What I'm going to do is make sure that this
light has the option turned on called, Cast Shadows.
| | 05:33 | Now, the thing is people are like, okay, I
have got Cast Shadows on, why don't I see shadows?
| | 05:38 | Well, because you have to go a step further.
| | 05:40 | You then need to go to the individual layer,
down to Material Options and make sure that
| | 05:45 | that has Cast Shadows, which it does.
| | 05:48 | So then we go a step further to our backdrop,
and this is why it seems people get intimated
| | 05:53 | by After Effects, Material Options, oh, I want you
to go ahead and accept shadows. So there it is.
| | 06:02 | We have it. You see the little shadows.
So, there is casting one.
| | 06:05 | Now, we could just go back to the light.
| | 06:08 | If you look at the light, we have the ability
to control the shadows here, so I can adjust
| | 06:12 | how dark the shadows get.
| | 06:15 | You see there, there's her shadow behind her,
see it growing as I adjust the slider, and
| | 06:21 | we could adjust how much it diffuses.
So, how spread out does it get?
| | 06:24 | Is it a really tight shadow that's very,
very dark or is it more spread out?
| | 06:31 | So now we've got a nice shadow on that
back wall, and if I adjust the position of the
| | 06:36 | light there, I want you to see
how the shadow actually moves.
| | 06:41 | Abba: That's pretty cool!
| | 06:42 | Rich: Yeah, so we've done a digital
relighting job there to cast shadows on the backdrop,
| | 06:48 | and that looks really cool to me.
| | 06:50 | In just a second, we'll go ahead and make a
tweak to the color and put the camera into motion.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating the camera| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: All right, Abba. So it's looking pretty
good, but you had some art direction comments.
| | 00:04 | Abba Shapiro: Right, I felt that I wanted
this to be more at the golden hour.
| | 00:07 | So I wanted to tint the light.
| | 00:10 | I wanted to give it a little bit of that
sunset feel, make a little more yellow, and because
| | 00:15 | we can change the color of the light,
it's going to affect both her and the wall.
| | 00:18 | Rich: Yeah, a quick double-click on
the layer, and we can absolutely do that.
| | 00:22 | We can go ahead and sample a color or just
dial it in and definitely, you see there how
| | 00:27 | it's changing the feeling of
what time of the day it is.
| | 00:31 | So, there's the golden hour versus as we're
getting later in the day, and it's cooling
| | 00:35 | down, but I like that.
| | 00:36 | Let's go ahead and warm that up a little bit,
and I'll click OK, and you can always see
| | 00:42 | that by just toggling preview
there to see the before and after.
| | 00:46 | That's definitely changing the color temperature and
doing a nice job of unifying the backdrop and the foreground.
| | 00:51 | Abba: I think that's one of the key things
is you do want to unify that foreground and
| | 00:55 | the background because
that's what helps to sell the key.
| | 00:57 | Now, you're going to show us another trick
that really is going to help sell this key.
| | 01:00 | Rich: Yeah, we're going to put a little
bit of sense of perspective by moving it, and
| | 01:04 | because there's distance between the foreground and the
background, this is going to feel more photorealistic.
| | 01:08 | So, there's our Camera layer, and I've got
that, I'll just twirl it down, and you'll
| | 01:13 | see similar controls for Position and
Point Of Interest, so there's my camera.
| | 01:18 | I'm going to keep the Point Of Interest pointed
right at her, but I'm going to swing the camera
| | 01:22 | here a little bit on position.
So it's going to move off to the side a bit.
| | 01:27 | As I do that, you notice that we're getting a little
bit of overshoot, so we'll just pull that camera in.
| | 01:32 | Abba: She stays centered,
but the background is changing.
| | 01:36 | Rich: So that's looking pretty good, and
then I'll just move the playhead forward to
| | 01:40 | about 10 seconds there, and I'm going to
move the position of the camera, sort of rock it
| | 01:47 | the other way, and I'll adjust the
Point of Interest just a little bit here.
| | 01:54 | You see how it frames that up.
| | 01:55 | In fact, I'll just drop the camera a
little bit, so it goes a little higher or we can
| | 01:59 | go down below, which is more common for sports,
and it's sort of shooting in, and we'll just
| | 02:04 | push that in a little bit like a simple zoom.
| | 02:09 | You see, you can completely reframe the
shot very easily to get a new composition.
| | 02:14 | If we drag in between there,
you see the camera move.
| | 02:18 | Abba: And you'd automatically set the keyframes or
where the start and the endpoint were for your camera.
| | 02:23 | Rich: Yeah, all I had to do was turn on
the stopwatch there, and that makes it easy.
| | 02:27 | Again, there are full
courses here on After Effects.
| | 02:30 | This is just to expose you to what's possible.
| | 02:32 | I'm going to take advantage of a little bit
of an Ease Out, so it's going to leave that
| | 02:36 | keyframe gently and then Ease In,
and that will make a nice, gentle stop.
| | 02:41 | When we go ahead and play that there, you're
going to see that we're getting a little bit
| | 02:45 | of a sense of a camera move,
and that's going to add drama.
| | 02:48 | So, if I was doing a nice motion graphic
piece here, a title sequence, or I just wanted to
| | 02:52 | add some pop, this is giving you total
flexibility, not only could we change the backdrop, but
| | 02:57 | in post-production, we're able to
completely change the camera work as well.
| | 03:01 | Abba: This is something that's really nice
to have fine-tuned control of, and because
| | 03:05 | you're doing this in post, you can really tweak
it and make it look exactly the way you wanted.
| | 03:10 | Rich: If it wasn't the right action, all
I'd have to do is pull those keyframes to
| | 03:14 | the part that I wanted, and it'd be easy
to change, but that does give you that sense
| | 03:18 | of motion, and it does feel like we're moving
around our subject and everything is totally flexible.
| | 03:23 | So if you don't get what you want here, it's
as simple as grabbing the Convert Vertex tool,
| | 03:28 | and you can even round that out, so you
get a nice curved path, and you see that that
| | 03:32 | our camera is arching a bit more.
It's really pretty cool.
| | 03:36 | The one thing I do recommend is under the
Camera options here, you play with the Focus
| | 03:41 | Distance for the Depth of Field.
| | 03:43 | And you see that little box? You want to put
it on your subject, so she's staying in focus
| | 03:49 | because once you've done that, you can now
go ahead and crank up the blur level and play
| | 03:54 | with the Aperture setting on the camera.
| | 03:56 | As you open up that Aperture more,
what would happen in real world, Abba?
| | 03:59 | Abba: Well, in real world your
Depth of Field would get very shallow.
| | 04:03 | It's kind of like being able to shoot with 1.4
lens, but always keep you subject in focus.
| | 04:07 | Rich: I've just exactly done that.
I basically went to a 1.4 Aperture.
| | 04:11 | I'm wide open there, and it's only
affecting the backdrop because I could exactly place
| | 04:17 | where that focus distance box is, and you
don't know how many times I wish I had that
| | 04:21 | in the real world, a little virtual box, that
only I could see, that tells me what's in focus.
| | 04:25 | Abba: Yeah, there's nothing as frustrating as the
nose being in focus and the eye being out of focus.
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| Matching color and exposure for video| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: We've got another key here, pretty
straightforward composite, and I just wanted
| | 00:04 | to show a couple of down and dirty tricks on this
scene and one more that I often use to sell the shot.
| | 00:09 | Abba Shapiro: Now, I really like
this background. It really pops.
| | 00:12 | I love beautiful skies, but she
doesn't quite look like she's really there.
| | 00:17 | Rich: Yeah, she's a lot bluer
than the background. It's all fine.
| | 00:22 | Let's say we had a little bit of motion there,
I'll scale that backdrop up a little bit more,
| | 00:27 | and we're going to do some
simple motion on the backdrop.
| | 00:29 | We'll just use Anchor Point for that.
So we'll set it to start.
| | 00:33 | We've got a nice gentle
sort of cloud moving through.
| | 00:36 | We come a little bit later in the shot,
and we animate that with just a little anchor
| | 00:42 | point move, and that's fine, right?
| | 00:45 | Now, it's feeling a little less static, so
it's starting to look a little bit believable,
| | 00:50 | like the clouds are gently floating by, but it
still feels like a photo that she's stuck on top of.
| | 00:56 | Abba: Right, I like the fact that you did
the clouds left and right because if you tried
| | 01:00 | the trick that you did with the wall in the
last movie, because the sky is so far away,
| | 01:06 | that distance wouldn't feel right.
| | 01:08 | The only thing clouds can do from
that distance is go left or right.
| | 01:11 | You're not going to arch
around and see these big moves.
| | 01:14 | So, they need to be careful about what they make
their background do, depending on what the background is.
| | 01:19 | Rich: So, we'll go ahead and
just sell this the rest of the way.
| | 01:21 | I'll put this at Full Quality here, so we
can accurately judge the key, and we'll make
| | 01:26 | sure that this is set to Full Quality.
| | 01:27 | I'm going to just duplicate that layer and
put it on top to make a footage sandwich.
| | 01:32 | Now, in doing that, you might say, well, why?
| | 01:35 | Well, if we just switch this over here, we've
got a bunch of blending modes, and I'll experiment.
| | 01:41 | I'll typically start with Soft Light and obviously,
that's too strong, but you see how the colors are matching?
| | 01:46 | Abba: Yeah, so, what it's doing is it's actually
tinting the sky color on both her face and her clothing.
| | 01:51 | Rich: Yeah, It's creating some reflections.
| | 01:53 | So, if we drop that down to a lower opacity
there, you see with it off and on, that her
| | 02:00 | skin is now picking up the color of the clouds
and the sky around her, and that works pretty well.
| | 02:05 | Now obviously, if you're concerned that it's
an exact match, nothing says you can't scale
| | 02:10 | this layer up a little bit more so that it's
not an exact match of what was on top of her.
| | 02:15 | So now it's a slightly different pattern, but
it's still got the right colors of the environment.
| | 02:19 | Abba: Because that's the key, it's the colors.
Even sometimes a little bit of a blur sometimes,
| | 02:24 | if the background has some really sharp edges.
| | 02:26 | Rich: Yeah, you can also try using the Hue
mode, and you'll notice there with hue, we
| | 02:31 | have to adjust that down even lower, but look
at how the colors are being picked up in her
| | 02:35 | highly reflective shirt and
she is matching the scene.
| | 02:39 | So, it's really up to you, which mode you use.
| | 02:41 | I'm a big fan of Soft Light at a low opacity,
and as you said, if necessary, a quick blur
| | 02:47 | on that layer will just soften it up a bit,
but now, look at that, before and after.
| | 02:56 | It's subtle, but look at how her nice sort
of alabaster skin is reflecting the clouds
| | 03:01 | and those rich oranges and purples and her
shirt looks a little bit more realistic, as
| | 03:06 | it starts to pick up some of the color.
| | 03:08 | We'll just do a quick preview there, and that's
going to feel a lot more natural. What do you think?
| | 03:13 | Abba: I really like it.
The colors are really starting to work for me.
| | 03:17 | I think, one of the things that we're going
to do is we're going to look at maybe some
| | 03:20 | of the luminance values to make sure that she is
not so bright, compared to the sky or vice-versa.
| | 03:24 | Rich: Yeah, It's very easy to select that clip,
and I would generally use a Curves Adjustment
| | 03:30 | for that, and by just making a nice simple
Curves Adjustment, you could start to pull
| | 03:36 | things down, in this case, the Mid Tones just
little bit, and you see that those are better
| | 03:42 | matching the environment and so
the lighting condition she's at.
| | 03:45 | Abba: Yeah, I mean, I'm amazed at one simple
change can really make this thing look natural.
| | 03:50 | Rich: That's what it is.
| | 03:51 | You want to make one little change at a
time, as opposed to a bunch of changes.
| | 03:55 | Like earlier, when we started fiddling
with all the sliders and the keyer, and it got
| | 03:58 | so bad, we just had to reset it.
| | 04:00 | Same thing holds true, make an adjustment,
look at it, make an adjustment, look at it,
| | 04:06 | and that's what we did here.
I think that looks a lot better.
| | 04:09 | Here's one more example that's already completed, that I
just want to show you those same things coming into play.
| | 04:15 | Let's take a look here.
| | 04:16 | We've got our backdrop, and we applied an
Adjustment layer, and that Adjustment layer
| | 04:21 | is just darkening things down a little bit.
Put a little bit of a Fast Blur on it.
| | 04:27 | We've got our subject being keyed.
| | 04:29 | We added the overall Ambient Light,
and then we added the other light.
| | 04:34 | In this case here, the
light's really far off to the side.
| | 04:38 | Why do we put the light so
far to the side in this case?
| | 04:40 | Abba: She might be getting
light from outside the window?
| | 04:44 | Rich: In this case, I wanted some harsher
shadows because this is a shadowy area of
| | 04:49 | the image, while the brighter
area of the photo is over there.
| | 04:52 | Abba: Now, what's interesting is when you
showed me this backdrop, before we started
| | 04:56 | rolling on this movie, I was thinking,
he's never going to be able to make this sell.
| | 05:00 | It's just going to look really fake, kind
of like when you go up into the Sears Tower
| | 05:06 | and they take your picture, and I am really,
really surprised at how cool this looks.
| | 05:12 | Rich: Well, HDR is a cool thing,
and you've got to be careful there.
| | 05:15 | Obviously, that can't get too far, but by
putting a little bit of blur on there, which
| | 05:19 | is what we did with the Adjustment layer there, I
did a Radio Blur, it creates a sense of perspective.
| | 05:25 | If you look at that there, let's take a look
at that Adjustment layer, and we'll put that
| | 05:29 | back to Normal mode for a second.
| | 05:31 | What I did is I really cranked that
up to create a sense of perspective.
| | 05:37 | There's my adjustment layer, and I set the focal
point for the blur to be right behind my subject.
| | 05:45 | So if that's where she's going to be standing,
I'm going to create a sense of direction or
| | 05:50 | perspective there, and then it's
just a matter of darkening it down.
| | 05:54 | So I went with something that was a little
bit darker, Multiply or Soft Light that just
| | 05:58 | sort of mixes those together, and then we
could lower the opacity a bit, but that just
| | 06:04 | does a nice job of making it feel a little bit
more drama in the lighting at the background.
| | 06:10 | Then we put our subject in, and we lit her
and by putting that light off to the side,
| | 06:16 | she has a bit of a drama light.
| | 06:17 | But I'm going to do that
same trick you talked about.
| | 06:20 | Let's just put a little bit of blue into that
light to affect what we're dealing with, and
| | 06:26 | that's going to just match the
time and temperature. There we go.
| | 06:30 | It feels a little bit
more like a night time shot.
| | 06:32 | Abba: It feels like you were actually
shooting on top of a building and the city behind her.
| | 06:36 | Rich: That's great because we didn't have
the airfare to go there, nor that did we know
| | 06:40 | that the sky was going to be
dramatic and cloudy, but not raining.
| | 06:43 | Abba: That's right.
| | 06:44 | You can never predict the weather, but you can
always predict your stills and your stock photos.
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| Rendering the animation| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: Now that we've got some shots done, I'm
going to render these out, so they're ready to bring in.
| | 00:04 | If I'm using Premiere Pro, I could just drop
the After Effects projects in, but these are
| | 00:08 | pretty intense with lighting and depth of field,
so I think it's a pretty good idea to render.
| | 00:12 | Abba Shapiro: Now basically, rendering is just
like flattening an image, so instead of having
| | 00:15 | all these layers and all this computer work
being done, it's just going to be a movie.
| | 00:21 | Rich: Yeah, and we'll just add that to the
render queue, so I've got that composition
| | 00:24 | selected there in my project, and I can
say Composition > Add to Render Queue.
| | 00:30 | The shortcut is just Ctrl+M or
Command+M, as in make a movie.
| | 00:33 | It puts it in, and you've got your settings here,
and this is not a detail of the After Effects class,
| | 00:38 | I just want to give you the quick highlights.
| | 00:41 | Best Settings are fine, and then you can
click on where it says Output Module, and this is
| | 00:45 | where you could choose the file format you want
to write. I typically go with the QuickTime Movie.
| | 00:51 | You can click the Format Options, and this
is where you could choose a Codec, things
| | 00:55 | like JPEG 2000 are pretty popular or Photo - JPEG,
and this will make a nice broadly
| | 01:01 | compatible file, or you can go with
something else like DVCPRO, if you need to.
| | 01:05 | You'll see down here some uncompressed Codecs that
are installed with QuickTime Pro, pretty easy stuff.
| | 01:11 | So we've got that high quality, I click OK.
If there was audio, I would choose that.
| | 01:17 | When I'm happy with that, I'll
just click here and make a template.
| | 01:21 | In this case, I'll call
this, JPEG 2000 No Audio.
| | 01:26 | Abba: When you're talking about compression,
it's a tradeoff just like with JPEG quality
| | 01:30 | and TIFF quality and animation quality.
| | 01:34 | You just go up and down and find the best solution
for your needs, for your non-linear editing system.
| | 01:39 | Rich: Yeah, there are lots of choices.
| | 01:42 | Make sure you take a look at some of the lynda.com
training on After Effects, it will go deeper,
| | 01:45 | but now that that's all set, I can go ahead and
choose a location where I want those files stored.
| | 01:51 | I've got the Render folder selected, I'll
click Open, and store that there and choose
| | 01:55 | Save, and now that we've set up one,
everything else we had after this will automatically
| | 02:01 | target the correct destination.
| | 02:04 | So we go ahead and add the rest of the
movies in, and the process is pretty similar.
| | 02:08 | I'll choose the correct output module
that I want and choose a destination.
| | 02:14 | That's the advantage of making those presets and just
click on the File name and make sure you choose the path.
| | 02:21 | Notice it seems to be going to
the right location, which is great.
| | 02:24 | It learned from the first movie so that's
pretty cool, and when we're all set, and I'll
| | 02:30 | click Render and everything starts to process.
| | 02:34 | You see, it just goes through and creates
the finished movies, and you get this little
| | 02:37 | yellow bar here to track progress, it
gives you an estimated completion time.
| | 02:42 | Tells you how long it's taking, how long
that shot is going to take to render, but when
| | 02:45 | it's done, it's a ready-to-use movie.
| | 02:47 | Abba: Now, do I need to go out to lunch or can I
actually do work on other projects on the same machine?
| | 02:53 | Rich: After Effects will
keep running in the background.
| | 02:55 | If you got a beefy system with lots of RAM,
you can go ahead and work on something else,
| | 02:59 | catch up on some emails,
switch back to Premiere Pro.
| | 03:02 | If you don't have enough RAM in your system
or you want the fastest render, then switch
| | 03:07 | over to another machine or take your lunch
break or render at the end of the day, but
| | 03:11 | rendering is not the sort of thing that you
sit there and watch. It's a lot like boiling water.
| | 03:15 | The more you stare at it,
the longer it seems to take.
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ConclusionGoodbye| 00:00 | Rich Harrington: We'd like to sincerely
thank you for joining us today.
| | 00:02 | Hope you had a lot of fun and
definitely feel like you learned something new.
| | 00:05 | Remember, Chroma keying isn't that hard.
| | 00:07 | You are just going to take your the
time and be a bit methodical about it.
| | 00:10 | Abba Shapiro: The key thing is
practice, practice, practice.
| | 00:14 | You want to be really comfortable with
shooting a green screen before you do it for real.
| | 00:18 | Rich: Yeah, so hopefully
this gave you some ideas.
| | 00:21 | As Abba said, the key to keying is practicing.
| | 00:24 | Be sure to also check out
some of the other titles.
| | 00:26 | Abba and I have a bunch of stuff up here on
lynda.com about photography and video production,
| | 00:30 | and we'd love to hear ideas for future classes,
so be sure to leave comments. Thanks for tuning in.
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