VFX Keying: Master Course

- [Steve Wright] This is Steve Wright welcoming you to my VFX Master Course: Keying. The first in a series of master courses focused on essential skills in visual effects compositing with Nuke, skills you need to get and keep a job. This master course is a grand tour of green screen and blue screen keying and compositing techniques that's intended for intermediate Nuke artists. You can do this course with compositing software other than Nuke, but floating point math is an absolute requirement. In this course, we'll cover every aspect of keying, spill suppression, color correction, compositing workflows, and a myriad of techniques for solving edge problems and sweetening the comp.

These are techniques I've accumulated during my 20 years of production experience on over 70 feature films. To produce the first truly comprehensive course on the complex subject of keying. I've also leveraged my deep understanding of the math and science of compositing from my book Digital Compositing For Film and Video. To add powerful new techniques to solve some of those vexing problems in keying. Mastering the keyer nodes is simply not enough. This course is all about the larger art and science of keying.

It's not about the keyers themselves. The assumption is that you are already familiar with the keyers like Keylight and Primmatte. If not or you wish to brush up, I've collected all my keyer tutorials into chapter 12, the keyer tutorial appendix at the end of this course. One very important technique we'll learn about is preprocessing the green screen in order to sweeten the clip so that your favorite keyer can pull a better key. In that chapter, I demonstrate the truly awesome screen correction technique that replaces the uneven green screen or blue screen backing with a perfectly uniform color that every keyer will love.

Some of what we need to key for visual effects is not a green screen or a blue screen. So, there's an entire chapter on other keying techniques such as Luma Key, Chroma Key, Channel Keys plus a couple of keying techniques that I'll be you've never seen before. There's an entire chapter on still suppression that goes into exactly what is going on inside the D-spill operation, multiple D-spill techniques, and the art effects to watch out for. I also reveal my proprietary adaptive despill technique which will give you perfect edges in every comp.

A critical part of any visual effects shot is photo-realistic color correction so that all of the layers appear to have been shot together at the same time in the same light space. We'll see how the various color correction operations affect both the picture and the pixel code values, then focus on a professional work flow that will help you to get a hero shot every time. There are also workflow examples that show you how to take the various techniques of keying, spill suppression and image blending, then integrate them together for great composites.

We'll see a variety of techniques for sweetening the comp with light rep, edge blending, interactive lighting and even artist generated shadows. We'll also see a variety of methods for fixing the discolored edges that have vexed artists for years, including an astonishing technique for completely replacing the discolored edges with picture perfect pixels. Following that is an entire chapter devoted to special keying problems like hair, motion blur, smoke, fire and even tips on how to cope with bad video.

I'm sure that you've watched many tutorials on keying this shot or that, but when you sat down to do your own shot, you found problems not covered in those tutorials. That will not happen after taking this course. You will finish this course with a library of powerful techniques that will help you to become a master keyer. Now, let's get started.