From the course: Video Gear

Blending a key with the background with Light Wrap by Red Giant

From the course: Video Gear

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Blending a key with the background with Light Wrap by Red Giant

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- Rich, we've done a key in After Effects and Premiere Pro. We've had some varying results, but overall, pretty good. The thing that drives me a little crazy when I look at key work that I do and that others do, except for at the very high level of Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi stuff, is that one of the hardest things to do is to sort of get the foreground subject to feel like they blend better with the background. Sure, you can easily kick out the green background or the blue screen background, if you need to. But it can be sometimes hard to make it feel like they're one instead of two separate elements. I know that we've been talking a little bit about this, about a way to do that, and it's with a special plug-in that helps you blend the foreground and the background. What's that all about? - It's called light wrapping. Essentially, what we're going to do is take the color and the luminosity values of the background, and try to better wrap that around our subject, so it feels a bit more integrated. This week, we have two different flavors of this plug-in. One from Red Giant, and a new one from Digital Anarchy. We'll take a look at both. - Here's our same subject that we've keyed before. Let's go ahead and just knock the background out. We'll use a preset here in After Effects to do the key light, some spill suppression. - I have that layer selected. If I double-click, it adds it. I've done a small thing of a slight channel blur on the green channel that does a little bit of extra noise reduction. - That's a great technique, by the way, just to do that little bit of blur on the green channel, because remember, we've talked about wrinkles and things of that nature. The softer we can get that green channel by itself, the more success we'll probably have in the key. - Now we're in Keylight, and we just eyedropper to get the background. - Now, you clicked close to the subject's face. I think that's an important thing, is that I tend to do the same thing. The closer you click to the person's face, generally speaking, the better your key is going to be, simply because those are the values that really matter. What's right around them. - That's working pretty well. We'll position the background here in just a second, But that did a decent key. Let's just turn that background off for a second. I see, though-- - A little green spill. But that's what the advanced spill suppression is for. Are you ready? One, two, three... And... gone. - There you go. Love it. Perfect. - That fine silver hair there, along the edges, not a problem. It got rid of all that spill, which was just natural, from the background. - I agree. It looks good. - We got that there. We got a decent key. But we're not quite done. Let's just turn on a background, and what we're going to do is we're going to position that background and tweak it. I've got everything set to full quality here. That's why After Effects is a little slower on the responsiveness, but when you're doing this type of work, seeing the detail like that in actual quality is pretty important. - Let's position that. That's great. We've got a backdrop behind him. It looks like he's sort of in an office environment. - But right away, Rich, I'm noticing the problem. If you look at his right shoulder here, it almost looks like there's a hard edge between him and the background. That is because of that lack of light wrap. The lighting in the background is a little different than the foreground, and it makes him feel separated from the background. - What we'll do here is we'll choose Effect, and from the Key Correct package from Red Giant, we're going to choose this thing called Light Wrap. What it allows us to do is choose which layer is the background. - You have the office back there. - I'll just select it, and it picks it up, and it starts to get that color. We could adjust the width and how much that bleeds over. - That's probably a little too much, right there. - Yeah, and we could actually tone down the brightness, so it's not so strong, or blend it, but it just creates a subtle wrap around the edge, so that we start to feel like he's a bit more in that environment. - Depending on what you're doing there, with the comp mode there, you can adjust how these two layers are being composited together, depending on the situation, but it does, again, gives that feel of slightly more integration. - Let's just actually bring this up, slightly. We'll let that bleed over on the edge, there. We can see that, and if we toggle it on and off, it's just creating a nice little wrap around his shoulder. - This is a finishing step for a key. You're going to do a lot of the work in your actual key. Your spill suppression, color correction, that kind of stuff. When it comes to light wrap, this is that last little bit you're going to do after everything's pretty much already in place, to just polish it up a little bit. - Watch what happens, Rob, when we switch the background. I put a different background in here, and now he's outdoors. It totally does not look, this, he was in a studio environment, and now, it doesn't look like he's outside. Let's just affect that two ways. First off, I'm going to choose the light wrap for the right layer. - Do the math differently now. - Look. It picked up the bright edge of the sun, there. It totally looks like the sun is hitting his shoulder, and it picked up the darker edge there. But here's another cool plug-in that's kind of lazy. You're probably going to cringe, as a colorist. (laughs) But I'm just going to say Key Correct, and I'm going to choose this one called Color Matcher, and what I'm going to do is simply put that before the Light Wrap, and I'll say the target layer to match is that JPEG. Boom. Instantly adjusts the luminosity and some of the other values, and we could blend it back if we feel it's too strong, but it's a way for those of us who don't have your mad ninja skills with color grading to quickly match it. Now, as I switch to that other background, let's go into the interior, and I say match that office background. It picks up that light. - It's a really great way of working. I think that the light wrap, to me, again, is just that little bit of a finishing touch that takes your keys over the edge. It's really just, it's pretty sophisticated technology. Rich, just to be clear, are these plug-ins only available in After Effects, or are they available in other tools, like Premiere Pro? - Rob, Red Giant makes plug-ins for lots of different host applications. This particular package is available for After Effects and Premiere, but they do have other plug-ins available for different operating systems and different host systems. But we have another one from Digital Anarchy, so let's take a look at that next.

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