From the course: Video Green Screen Workflows (2017)

An introduction to keying in After Effects

From the course: Video Green Screen Workflows (2017)

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An introduction to keying in After Effects

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- Let's start to explore keying in After Effects. I'll show you my favorite key, which is going to be the Keylight plugin, and we'll use some recipes that are included with the application. To start, open up the A7R4K footage. And let's set the composition settings to 1920 by 1080. So I'll switch this to HDTV, 29.97, and click Ok. This gives us extra resolution. I'll be able to scale the footage, in order to actually adjust its size, and adjust its position to taste, to get the framing I desire. Now, we need some backgrounds, so I'll choose File, Import, File. Navigate to a folder that contains backgrounds. I'll go to folder 7.5 Focus, and then press Command-Up Arrow. You can navigate to this manually as well, by simply going to where you copied the exercise files. Feel free to choose any of the backgrounds that you've made. I'll choose this one here, background processed. File, Import, go to a different folder, let's grab the desert, and we'll bring in one more for variety. We'll do the conference room. Now, I'll put those three into a folder, and call it backgrounds. Let's drop one of those behind here. We'll use the conference room and drop it down below. Now to invoke the key, select the layer you want to key. Come over to your effects and presets panel, if it's not visible, you can choose it from the Window menu, and choose Effects and Presets. Type in the word, keying, and you'll find some utilities. I'm going to use keying green blur. This will remove some of the noise in the green channel and ensure that the green doesn't have any speckles in it, which could be hard to key. Let's twirl that up, now I'll just type in Keylight. And I'm going to grab this preset here, which is all about keying and spill suppression, and drop it on. What we need to do is, select the screen color and click close to the subject. This will start to knock that background out. Later on, we'll talk about the other two options here for key cleaner and spill suppression. But what we can do is view the screen matte and see the problems. I notice, for example, that on her jewelry, we have a little bit of spill. We can refine that if we want, and I'm going to do it the easy way, using the screen matte controls. Let's clip the white, so that we get a nice clean white there in the middle, and slightly clip the black so it's crisp. That looks good. The hair has some partial transparency in it, which is desired. If you'd like, you can put a very small amount of shrink to contract inwards and soften the edge, ever so slightly. Now I'll switch that back to the intermediate result, to see what's happening. It's looking pretty good. Don't worry about the green spill for now, we'll clean that up a little bit later. But all in all, that's a pretty solid key. Looking at what's happening there, we've got a nice overall composite. Let's go ahead and make an adjustment here. I'm going to switch to another layer. And I'll go to the project panel, drop a background in, and use that same preset for keying and Keylight. I'll drop the screen color out, not bad, take a look at the screen matte, and you can see that there's a little bit of area that's not as black as it should be. Therefore, we'll simply clip the black, to remove some of those problems. And do the same thing for white. Now I see a few little spots there, and this is where de-spot comes in. I can de-spot the white. It looks very good. We'll switch back to the intermediate result, and it's looking pretty solid. Now that green fringe, don't worry about it. The advanced spill suppression option simply needs to be turned on, and it's going to take all of that out. Let's go ahead to that A7R, scroll down, and turn on the spill suppression effect, and you see that the green fringe is completely removed. Alright, that's looking really good. If you'd like some more practice, feel free to try the other two clips. Remember, you can also use tools to make a basic mask. Double-clicking, for example, applies a mask, and you can simply select that mask and adjust its shape. I'll press Command-T for free transform, and pull that in, to remove that overshot edge there. Now we've got a ready to key file. Alright, let's move on to the next step.

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