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Green Screen Compositing with Keylight

Lesson 24 from: Adobe After Effects

Jeff Foster

Green Screen Compositing with Keylight

Lesson 24 from: Adobe After Effects

Jeff Foster

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Lesson Info

24. Green Screen Compositing with Keylight

Lesson Info

Green Screen Compositing with Keylight

This segment we're going to be talking about green screen and we're gonna be talking about green three and blue screen because one kind of goes with the other uh I'm often asked what's the difference between him why would use one over the other a short history on that is basically the blue screen development was first because we're primarily using film and the color of the blue that they chose was in a light spectrum that was easy to separate out and not interfere with too much action that was going on in front of it uh when they first went to video, the blue channel was a little too noisy not enough resolution in it so they decided to use the luminous channel which is the green channel are rgb red, green blue eso both the blue and the red had a little less information in it the green had the most information, so they chose green as the standard for doing video plus most in most cases there's not much green in human flesh or hair or animals things like that so that tend teo tended to b...

e the norm and has carried on to be the norm. Um and obviously I've got a large background in the whole green screen world, so I've got a book out there it's not a plug for the book because right now you can only get it on kindle so but the green screen process is very deep in complex process, but the beauty of using aftereffects is we can pull out uh pull out that green and get some great results without too much third party help it also just with what's built in another reason why you might use blue over green is if you have green in the foreground you've got green foliage you have green green objects creatures, puppets, riel life nature things like that um you're going to want to use blue instead and also you can use the blue sky and key that out and it's just a great way to put in a new sky if you want to put clouds in the sky cloudy sky in or um or interesting sky if you have a really good blue sky, you can use this process to replace the sky, so we're going to dive into first green screen on dh thes air both clips from my stock photo I stock photo dot com they've been a great supporter and sponsor for me for several years and they've been really good about giving me content to use for training and then pass on this content with my projects to you so you'll be able to work with the same files that I'm working with on these projects that are using their stock and this is a slow motion shot it's a little bit low riz um but it still it still could be used it's still functional and probably better than most green screen shots that you get handed when you're working in real production there's one story that I share it was a commercial that I did for a let's just say it was a cover girl and they, uh they were shooting this this scene with her in various situations, but she's flipping her hair like this girl is kind of and they shot her on scene on a set was a big set, and they shot her on the same set that they were shooting big wides uh, shots with but they had a green screen in the background that had no lights on it whatsoever. It was just whatever available studio lights were there, and then whatever fell on the green screen, apparently they thought that was going to be enough. So the director and the dp they weren't used to shooting with green screen, obviously so what? I was handed a sw this close up shot of this actress and she's flipping her hair around and the background was gray basically a little bit of green tinge to it, but it was pretty much gray grayer than my shirt I'm wearing green today, but this would have been better than what I was handed, so that took a huge process of pulling out masks and trying all different types of things that took me a day to do something that was only half a second long used in the commercial so lighting your green screens a big thing I'm really big on that and uh we uh we're just going to cover stuff that's been shot well for the most part today except we get into a little bit of roto work this afternoon I'm going to show you some crazy stuff so with that said since this shot is done quite well I've got her in the foreground and then I've got this image in the background and I I am using an image instead of video and trying to gain control of my mouse here hopefully the mouse isn't moving in the control room there there we go so I've got this image uh here is my background layer and I can move that around is it's bigger than what I need? I could move that around if I want on bears a couple of things I'm going to do with this we're going to do something besides just extracting the green screen we're going to um you know added another effect and kind of play with us a bit so this is kind of fun project this this was shot it's been slowed down shot in high speed and slowed down for us so it's gotta slow motion and I'm going to come up here to my effects and so I go to effect and keen and then I select key light now key light was introduced several versions ago and thankfully it's it's been there we don't have to use a third party plug in teo get a good result with keen in fact this is the first place I go to his key light I start there and then if I need other help then I'll go to third party tools but for the most part this does everything I need so you don't need to stretch it out that much so the first thing you d'oh you have your have your you're seeing out here you select this little eyedropper right here and you come out to the green and I try to find because a lot of times you're given footage or footage he shot there will be some vignette ing around the edges that maybe darker over here than it is over here and it kind of looks like that if we look up here in our info box this is a good place to find out what you're looking at look at these numbers here when I roll over parts of the image so I see here my green is one seventy five a mouse back there we go so it's about one seventy five looking at the green numbers primarily and I look over here it's about one forty so I want the highest green number or the g numbers in my rgb uh in here is possible so going teo click right there we see just with one click we've already got something toe work with but I never work with just this I never just do the one click and walk away because even the best shot scenes there's going to be a problem so I come back over here to my final result and I come up here to screen matt and that lets me really look at my mat extraction here we see over here right clicked in the green I've got a nice dark black area there's a little bit of noise back in here we see it softens up to gray out here that means that area really isn't transparent when we look at the final result is going to have a little casting in there and it's gonna be a little fuzzy so we need to clean this up so I come down here to the screen matt and I twirl this down and then I first start with my clip black settings and I just click and drag up in numbers until I see the areas of concern start to go black this is a little better it's really good here all of that noise is gone but I need to go just a little farther there we go because otherwise you're going to see some anti alia scene in here some some weird artifacts some compression issues this also tells you how good year footage is we can see it is fairly low res because we're seeing some some lines in here this may have been shot with with an interlaced mode, so the de interlacing or whatever didn't quite take fact for the compression is just so that we see this blocky stair stepping in there, but not much you can do about that, so we're just going to try to get the best extraction we can't go just a little bit farther till it goes away. I don't want to go so far that I lose her hair and everything else is a problem. We also see here's another problem introduced when we crank it up. Um she has some green in her outfit, so that could pose to be a problem too. But it's not a deal killer because we could always roto that out. So that's not a problem if it was really, you know necessary. So anyway, I bring that down till just the worst of the grey areas and the artifacts are, um are out and then to go the other way. I come over here to the clip white, which is right underneath it, and this I want to click and drag down and numb bers until anything that looks like it might be a reflection or a little bit of the green casting falling off on the edges uh or any kind of green spill goes away I can't do much about her dress but I can deal with you know anything that might have been reflections on her face that would show up his gray areas um I want the transparency in her hair though I really want that in there so that's important so I'm pretty happy with that I don't need to do anything more there's a lot of other things we could go into with this we don't need to win this one, so I'm going to go and look at my final result and that looks pretty decent to me that's fine, I am going to notice though, that parts of her dress are going to disappear down here see here the green areas on her dress, they kind of go transparent so it's kinda like the weatherman wearing a green tie, so what I would have to do in that case is tio duplicate that layer and since I've got the duplicated what was already had the key light applied to it, I go to the lower one and I turn off the light or just get rid of it altogether so now it's just gonna look like it did before that's because I've got this layer behind there and this is where I would use my masking tool and so I would just come in here with my pen tool and while I've got that layer selected just do a really rough what we call a garbage matt in the industry and we're going to be going into that later today to making garbage mats and what that means is it's just a way to get rid of the garbage you don't need so it's just holding everything out so in this case I need to hold in her dress I need to make sure that's framed well since it's going underneath another layer I don't need to worry about my edges anything so I would just set that my mask down here said my mask path er stopwatch to make the first key frame then just kind of watch through here since she's moving in slow mo that probably helps some so we don't have to make too many key frame adjustments here so I just want to make sure I'm out there range where it's going to see her without creating any in any other green stuff going on here so let's make sure we've got that and I think she's her hair's covering up on that side that's good so I just go out every couple secs okay there's a major turn there so right about there is good just drop the key frame and then here where she turns around I got to make sure that these come in so I don't see any of the green background actually bring that into because if she's going to go profile that I need that and she may flip back around again but I need to go to find where the extremes are there's an extreme there and again since this is not a major matt, this is like a thunder underneath matt I don't need to be that accurate I just need to make sure I'm not introducing more problems uh with with this I'm not having little areas of green show up outside of the range that she's moving I need to turn on the top one here again to see how far she goes before she flips around so right about there drop a key frame they come back around and using the top one on I'm still making my adjustments to the mask underneath but I can use the top one is a guide to see where my range of motion is the and on lee thing I'm doing is making sure that her her invisible elements on her uh dress don't don't go transparent and will bring that back around here as long as she's facing us we should be pretty good andi we're good we're good we're good we're good we're good uh we're bad okay see how the green shows up there that's what we don't want this green area here that's what we're trying to avoid so right before she does that I need to pull these in here okay? So we're good all through here and then write about it here I need to make sure that that's not coming outside the range that this one is holding it in the range so notice how I'm combining several things that we've learned this week uh because there is no such thing is a oneclick wonder click a button it does all the work and the way you go it just just never ever happens that way if you do get one it's either you're really lucky or um or you're you're not really looking at the details so it's very important to stay on top of things here okay, so we got some problems there, right? Is she's moving out, move this key frame over just a little bit and then right about here she doesn't swing out I need to pull these in considerably she's moving off to that side okay, so that should track that you're not trying to be perfect here we're just trying to be good plenty of time for perfect later okay there's that and that and that's good enough okay, so we've got our got our matter now, okay, so this is actually a pretty good pass at it. I may just do a quick run ran preview on up I saw a little bit of green go there my mask didn't quite follow around her neck I might just tweak that fix it real quick but it does a pretty amazing job on that hair though wouldn't you say mai gets her hair's going all over the place and even the areas where it's kind of flying around a little soft in some areas but that's fine okay so there's this one area that's bugging me right there I didn't get the map out of the way enough right here even though we're green on green that's gonna bug me that's really good bug me folks so let me fix that matt real quick and get that out of their trips I hit the wrong button if you hit the caps lock button here's a good good thing to know he hit caps lock what it does is it freezes your updates here so if you move anywhere in time it will it won't rear ender for you won't refresh so take make sure if you accidentally hit caps lock instead of the shift key that and it's not rendering anymore that's why I just know that check your caps lock key it'll give you that little red warning there anyway ok that's close enough not to spend too much time on that all right so we've got our first past with this now normally what I will do because again I'm not a one guy if there's some spill in the image in a lot of times there is if they're in a studio especially if there's a code walls behind them they're going to get some spill or their standing on a floor has green you're going to get some green spill on them or um lighter haired women or men are just clothing, some things pick up things or if the screen is over lit but they're too close to it there's all these things that can cause spillage and when that happens uh doing just what we did here isn't going to be enough you're either going to get a really harsh key where it's gonna look like she's had a haircut or been shaved um or you're going to get some some, uh, noise introduced in there and the noise is actually worse because all the areas where there's some softness like right down here where harris in here where's flying around there, some motion blur in her hair and that's what we're seeing there that's actual motion blur if that gets too noisy uh then the dark areas and you try to adjust for that the dark areas will start the old sparkle and get all this crazy noise going on in it and that's horrible and I'll show you an example of that here in a little bit of some productions like that, what I will typically do it doesn't hurt to do it anyway, but it also helps you maintain your, um, color tones, so also, if they had a little bit of green cast and their clothing not as much as she's got in that, but there's a little bit of green cast, they've got a brown on or a grey that's got a little bit all of innit? Sometimes that starts to go transparent a little bit and get noisy, and even if you try to get that white cranked up there still it's still going to have some problems with some of those the green pixels are going to be missing and you're gonna start seeing noise in there. What I'll do is again, I will duplicate the layer and then use my original layer down here underneath it right there and then I'll use a track matt on it, what I will do is I will use one layer to track matt another layer, and what do I mean by that? What I'm going to do is use the alfa or the transparency of this the same layer amusing, the layer itself, the the key that I got from that layer, using that transparency just like a cz if it was a mask, so say, if I converted that I'm just looking at the screen mat right there, I'm using that mask too create another mask of the same layer let me just show you I've got I've got a duplicate they're exactly the same and I just select the one underneath I go up to layer and then I go to track matt alfa matt okay well since I've got two copies of the same layer with the same amount of key light applied uh it's it's really overdone it it now it's it's overdone it's she's got a haircut now so if I turned that off we'll see oh there it is it's back again everything is back to where it wass but notice when I did that I've got two icons down here uh the bottom one has a little black hole in it and what that means and if you could see it up close you'd see there's there's actually that like the checkerboard pattern around there that means it's it's tracking a mat of the layer above it and this one with the white on it uh just means this layer is being tracked and it's also been hidden so it does at all automatically for you it hides the layer it does the track matt for you and so if I was to scrub through here now and get that I'd probably get a little more natural some of that natural color back if I had some really bad green spill still in here this is what I do next since I turned off key light I could turn key light back on but um reset it just like that and then instead of choosing a color, I go in and I say I just want to get rid of green so I'll come over here to my rgb settings and I'll just hit two fifty five for green that's pure green to fifty five and then click okay? And that will then take out any kind of green spill that exists in this image without altering anything it just takes out all the all the green information it'll key that out to that point, so if I turned that on and off, we'll see the only thing that's really changing with that on is the green in her dress here, so I want to keep the green in address because we spent all that time making that matt toe hold the green and so I don't really need to do that, but just to show you that if there was that problem, then I would I would do that, so actually I'm going to just delete key light don't need it all for that that bottom layer so now all over natural skin tones are back in there, we're going to have a little better key around her hair it's just going to look a lot better so let's do a ram preview here take a look at that and then there's one more thing that I'm going to do here to this there's so many things I could do I could go in and now color correct maura I could play with the exposure's more or change her colored balance and all of that I could do all of that and really make it feel more like she's in the scene we could play with turning these into three d layers where we're actually kind of moving a camera move we could play with iraq focus things like that but just a straight key like this pretend it's a hair commercial let's add a let's add an adjustment layer to this thing so I'm going to new layer new and adjustment layer and now I'm going to add in a plug in so plugging effects I'm going to go to effect and then in this one it is simulation d'oh I can never remember which one of these crazy here it is under generate it's ah effect generate hello come back in here then we go down to light rays and what this does is it uses the speculative data below it of that all the layers below it will use a speculator data to generate thes cool light rays coming out of the point that we choose so I'm going to obviously put that right into the sun right up here and then make adjustments accordingly so as she moves through there, I might want a little more radius on that some get crank up my radio's a bit it's exaggerated on as she moves away from the sun that light rays should shine out around her so see how it effects actually affects her earlier too it's not just in you know, behind her it's not just blasting out what's in the uh what's what's in the layer behind her but I'm having a blast up the radius a little more even just exaggerated a bit so now you can see as she moves the light rays come around and we've now got that glowing hair commercial that we all wanted to have in the first place here we go so let's render that out and see what it looks like wait a text a voice over and some great music and we've got a quick little hair commercial there so that's that's green screen magic right there being done right before your eyes so let's go and stop that render we could see a plate back in real time that's fun okay, so when you get this project I'll have one that's undone I've got one where I've already done it uh and I didn't I didn't matt out this one so he could still play with I didn't mask out her dress the one that I did already so but you'll be ableto see the before and after in some of these projects I try to do that so that you can play with it you can reverse engineer or look and compare what I did so this is one of the projects is a project you'll get as bonus material part just the course, right? Right, so this little guy just thought it was so cute that's why he had to have a great environment to be in well, what betterthan the same environment we just used right it's outdoors so I wanted to put him in in the outdoors here and I'm probably going to go through this one a little faster for the sake of time. But just to show you how easy this is typically with blue screen it takes it takes more light toe light a blue screen than a green screen that's another reason why people tend to go with green screens that takes less light that has to be very even light um with the blue screen it takes a lot more light to light up that color blue so and also blue screens usually are reside maurin real professional studios there aren't as portable. There are some that are portable, but most the time if you're in a blue screen studio it's been professionally painted, professionally done, professionally lit, they're not really going to have the same problems that green screen does the problem of the green screen is everybody goes out there, buys one of these one ninety nine kits off amazon and cover what comes the three lights and stands in a you know, piece of cloth and a stand to hold it and it's it's garbage you know you just can't get anything out of that. You can't put enough light on that to get it to look green, so you've got a lot of bad green screen shooting going on up there blue screen typically, though, is going to be shot, right? At least for the most part, we do have some lighting issues here I can actually see the back wall is in focus um they've got a shallow depth of field here based on the bird, but I still see some textures in the walls, the walls either unevenly painted where there's a problem there but still it's amazing how well our key light works I'm going up to effect keen and that key light and this one is almost a one click wonder I'm looking at my blue channel now in the higher the number number in my blew up here in my info, the higher the number, the better because I am trying to take out blue so it looks like somewhere around two thirty or so it's going to be the best I'm gonna grab that one and that's my final result let's look at our matt go to the screen, matt say yeah it's not bad there is a noise in here though again it's another low res file we can see where it one hundred percent here so that that tells us is a pretty small file uh I'm going to my screen, man click on that and I'm going to crank up my my clip black until the grey goes away and that's pretty good there clip white I got a little bit of spill right on the birds eyeball there want the eyeball to not be trans so just a little bit there. So now when I go back to my final result there I've got my little birds sitting on a plant with the trees in the background and all is right with the world there we go. So another trick that I did with this um I'll just go to the finished piece wants this place back here we go that looks plausible no there's, no movement on these leaves or anything so typically something like that I'm gonna be on the shot very long I want video not a still image but a way around that would be to fake some some camera movement and fake iraq focus and what I did here for this um been these down saying see what I did all right so I've got for one thing I've got some movement in my position so I just changed my position these aren't three d issa's still to tea so I just changed the position of the layers over time let me turn off the effects here so we can see what's going on there we go um so you can see the layers are moving like that again as I explained yesterday when you're talking about cameras you think about being there in the physical world you've got your camera would move how to make you have to move the layers to make the camera makes sense so if I've got an object here and I want I want the camera to look like it's moving this way well where would the camera go to make this move to here see so I would have the camera would have to have to move this way since I don't have a camera I just have to move the layers so I'm looking at it it's like okay to make it look like I'm the camera the camera's moving after moved the layer stuff to move both layers and it depends on how far away the distances between the object in front in the background is to how much I move each layer so again, this is a very subjective thing and you can see that I don't even have them on the same angle of movement which may actually create a problem so let's turn our effects back on I've got um eh let me turn on the effects we could see what I've got I've got camera lens blur here and you can see their key framed just opposite, so I start with the background in focus there's the camera lens blur said it's actually point to so it's just a slightly bit out of focus to give it a film look and then as I'm moving the bird into position, I'm faking iraq focus so just by using the camera lens blur uh on both of these and just changing them so I'm going zero to thirty on one and I'm going from like thirty to zero and the other let me see if I go I don't know if I went thirty on a foreground one here uh I only went fifteen, so I didn't go a full thirty on the foreground is too much didn't need to, but by doing that, I've simulated this rack focus and I've moved it I've given it some interest and now I don't necessarily need motion in that background plate to make it feel like this belongs together, so let me render this out, so now we're going to ram previous look at our ramp review from the beginning and we see that simulated rack focus easing into the position and it kind of feels like you're doing a nice little uh dolly movinto into position wall rack focusing and that helps sell the shot we'll do it again from the beginning so that's that's a very good really world example of using something like that and really selling the composite I always like to try to do that if possible if I have directorial control over my composite almost always fake a rack focus or some kind of movement with my my my foreground character if there if I'm putting them into another scene of some sort unless obviously it's for a scripted scene but that really helps sell the shot it takes away that hey I'm on a green screen look at me and I've got you know white background in this text flying around there's a place for all of that um and I'm going to show you that actually uh is an example here so let me close out of this that project uh will be in the bonus material see here uh these next two won't be in the bonus material but it will uh kind of carry on to what what we're working with here so let me go to this one yes is it this is from my um uh film a sci fi film that friend and colleague of mine is working on and this is to explain the scene just he know what's going on um this woman is uh she's got superpowers, and she just threw this guy across the room hit him with a frying pan there, posing as husband and wife on planet earth and now she's talking to another character after he's getting up from being flown across the room. So the effects in this and we can see the shot as I scrub across here, I'm doing that on purpose uh, incorporate two different things I've got thie green screen, of course, I've got to pull out of there, and then I've also got motion tracking to do and remember I told you earlier there's, a two point motion tracker that we can use, and so the first thing I want to dio so that's my background plate right there and that's just a ah locked off plate they they shot some of this on the set, and they shot some of this on a green screen stage so some of the shots that they weren't able to do riel action with because they had to do special effects and thrown across the room, that kind of thing that had some of the pieces had to be done in different locations, so what they did, luckily, is they gave us plates to work with that's what the technology is his plates, it just means it's locked off shot, we're still photo of different angles of the room that way you can use them to composite with the problem is if I'm just going to pull out the green screen key here well notice I've got stuff moving in the foreground they're moving the cameras actually dolling out away from them I would just have a static background there and it would look weird, you know? It just wouldn't work plus I have to get rid of all of these little tracking points and stuff in here so again with the garbage matt that's, the first thing I have to do is get rid of the garbage time to take out the trash. So first thing to do is make a quick garbage matt in here and that's what I'm going to key against so I'll do that on this top layer here there's a reason why I've got two of them here and I'm going to show you in a minute so uh I just got that one selected using my pan tool that's going to do a quick rodeo here and I missed that one up here let's do this, I want part of that broken furniture there they've been having a little tussle, so and this I was going to move I know I know some of these moves so that's why I'm kind of going tight on getting rid of these track points, okay, almost done there okay, that's the first frame of a garbage mat for this particular shot what I'm trying to do is get rid of all the stuff that doesn't belong in the shot. So as I scrubbed through time, I'm going to see okay there's there's my extremes the furniture on the left here is coming into a collision course, her shoulder here, her hair, the shoulder he stands up and, you know, obviously is obscured by the garbage matt so I have to animate the garbage, matt obviously. So what I do is off key frame that is the first one so in fermat mask and click my stopwatch to get my first key frame, then I'm going to come out here tio big extreme because I wanted to tween as much as possible for me and tween ing again is another technical term for in between ng so as we move key frames here I know that's an extreme that's an extreme there and this needs to move over a little uh, this one should probably go up a little because I anticipate that. So now I don't have to go in frame by frame with this. I just look and see what's going on here now I got a little dot there showing up I could go in there and tweak that more, but for time's sake, I'm not going to worry about it so that I go to another extreme movement. She turns around a little that's an extreme you go to all the extreme motion there and you find out what is happening right now I'm just looking at her I'm not looking at him so her shoulders twist and turn and then she stays for a bit so I know that's going to be another extreme motion. So I just pull this up here gonna make sure I keep that little dot covered and got to make sure this stays away from the furniture. Stay off the furniture. Okay, so this has to be there and anticipate him moving a little bit here as well. So now we can see the in between here and here. It's done all the tweeting for me. I've got a little dot going through there again. I'm not worried about it right now, especially since the backgrounds fairly dark and this moves it's not going to be a big issue. Okay, now he's going to stand up so let's see right about here I'm going to click my little diamond their toe, add a key frame right where it is going to go to here to another extreme he's right about there, so grab this and we're not gonna be ableto mask out that dot that's right behind him so we'll just have to live with it for now, I could if I wanted to take the time don't want to take the time during this demo and then pull this out here and we're almost done with our garbage. Matt looks like I got to move this one back here just a bit when he's moving pull this house that doesn't touch your shoulder and her head tilted a little there so our garbage man it just kind of scrubbed through and see cutting off his head a little there, you're fixed that while I'm at it maybe I can try to do that that works and it stays out of the way for the most part there we go case I got a couple dots showing up in there I could mask out if I wanted to more, but for the sake of our demo let's not worry about him uh and then now I've got my garbage matt made I don't have to worry about too much other junk in there when I go to key it so I'm going to now go to effect keen key light criminal eyedropper look for the green oh boy cem nice bright green in there did a good job lightness screen okay, so there's my first click goto my mat and we'll see that a lot of stuff I'm asked out there, uh, isn't used anyway, so I don't have to worry about that turning black I just have to look at what's inside my garbage. Matt here that's the only area I need to worry about a little gray over here a little bit up around her hair, going to come out here to my clip black crank it up just until I feel good about what's happening in those areas and you can see where the light is brightest too. You can see it's pretty much centered right in here because as I crank that up, it kind of halos you can see how that range goes arer up. So I just need to make sure that I'm black all the way up through the top of her head because that's the most critical, this goes a little gray here. It doesn't bother me now I see there's a little ghosting here on her, um, on her outfit and a little bit here on her hair. She's got blonde hair so picks up a little, even a little shine on her lip. And of course his shirt does too and a little bit of furniture, so we've got some green spill to deal with, so I just crank down the clip white just until I always go a little bit more than I need to and then go back and forth till I just see it disappear and a little bit on a shirt there that should be good okay, so let's look at our final result and that's not too bad I could live with that okay, so now if I just look at this the way that it isthe let's do a quick ran preview this is only a sioux second and a half long the green screen part looks good, but it looks really weird because it's their moving and stuffs moving but the background doesn't move to match them so with that being said, I need to track my background to match the movement or the foreground here so I'm gonna hide my, uh layer there worked so hard to keep out and I'm now going to grab this layer and I'm wondering why it's all I offset it on purpose or not not to worry ok matches okay, so what I'm going to do now is track a couple points here with this tracker I'm going to do the track motion we've done before, but now I'm going to select and steve just the one track point I'm going to select another option here which is scale I'm not worried about rotation I just wantto worry about scale what that's going to do is change the scale of that photographic image is going to change the scale to match uh between two points so in this one I've got these little black points here that they gave us on the wall and whoa hello didn't mean to do that I actually just want to grab the box sometimes it's hard to grab just the box there we go and pull it over still just the exit the box goes over the black point what something happened in my mouth there there we go try again just so centered over that black dot I don't need to change the size of this because this is a nice little track point some good do that for the first track point second track point out doing that here we go going to bring it over here to a dot opposing it okay so that as I scrub through this those dots are going to come closer together because the cameras pulling out so that's what's happening to the footage it's you know the cameras pulling out away from it so stuff in the background gets smaller so what I want to do here is actually I didn't do this the smart way I started right here in the middle so if I had started here on frame one I probably have a better result but since I didn't I have to come back out here ah the nicely nous is the analyze feature works backwards and forwards so I can start if I'm in the middle of a scene just to get my track points I can track both directions so I'm going to do them right in the middle of this shot I'm going to use the, uh analyze backward button they'll click that frank did it quick, okay and then I can go forward just click analyzed forward it goes right back through it all again there it isthe so now I have to go and hit my target. What point is it going to be? Is it going to be this image stack no it's going to be this background okay and then apply x and y almost rhymes so now I turn on my background and we see that it moves so you see, it kind of almost zooms out almost looks like video there we throw that in with our composite move this down where we see the whole thing and how we do render and now the scene makes more sense it's following the motion of the camera that we shot the original video footage with and that's why it's really important to have track markers on your green screen? If your camera's going to move or zoom or do anything you've always gotta have tracked points of some kind so we could go on I could spend days just on green screen and maybe we will sometime with future workshop next course, but yeah, definitely definitely, but you can see the importance of having all those tools, and again, this was all done inside after effects being able to make this scene very believable, I would probably go in, and I think I've got one completed here to, um I may have done yeah, did little camera lens blur on the just one point to the composited piece just to soften it up just a little bit and make it a little more film like because sometimes when you do a composite, the edges might be a little sharp or the background layer is blurred a little more than the foreground, and it just starts looking like a fake composite. Anything you can do to suddenly changed that, uh, perspective or change that visual feel to make it look like it was one scene, you do whatever it takes and sometimes that's color sometimes that's blurring and you think, well, I wanted to be clear. I wanted to be chris, we shot it and focus on why you're taking it out of focus is like because it needs to blend into the scene, it needs to look like one scene and that's why things like motion blur are so important the camera lens blurs important color is so important matching color to the foreground background again I could you know, and we may have to do a date or a three day workshop on compositing because there's so much of that you have to take into consideration so but that alone is what makes these things believable. If this was just a second and a half cut in a scene with natural naturally shot footage there's no way you could tell that with green screen shot because on seeing a screen for so little anyway on dh that's the thing with a lot of these effects one other thing I wanted to point out in this project is that, uh I'm not using a movie file here for my green screen track. This is actually what they call an image stack and when you're doing professional postproduction typically this is what the what the studios will stand you I do a lot of visual effects where class stuff for the, uh, green screen and compositing and you get ah folder full of sequential images and that's how this works. So let me just show you that really quick that's why I didn't want to convert this because I want to show you how you bring that in so I just go to import file and go to the segment to green screen and with this one and then my image back iss sit in that one yes, I believe that's the right one and so I find the lowest number in this stack looks like it's at the top, so once I click that number, notice how this shows up down here tiff sequence that could be d p x files. A lot of times they get d p x file sequences. That's another file format on dh if you're working with red cam are really high end stuff, you're going to get a lot of d p x because it's four k huge files and, um but it's great cause it just sucks men like it's a little quicktime movie. So as long as that image sequences clicked on and by default it does, it just brings it in. And that's what it gives us this converts it to an editable movie format force, even though it's a bunch of single images so what's cool about that too. It'll do it with j paige's pings whatever sequence you have. So if you shoot time lapse so you get little gopro, you've got a dslr, whatever and with interval ometer in your shooting. Ah, long timelapse sequence and you may have a thousand images for an all day shot. Then you just select the very first one oh, is this a sequence? Yeah, bring it in and then it just brings it in like a movie and then you khun edit it you khun spread out the time and do all kinds of great stuff with it so um this again is for part of a uh a that fun infomercial that I may be able to show a little teaser of toward the end of the day this was a a scene that, um it's a bio science type thing so it was talking about expressing jeans and are our dna process and if you're a biochemist, you'll love and get all of that stuff but the whole thing was a cz we needed to take one person and replicate them like, you know, fifty times in a scene doing different things but just standing there making gestures, looking kind of goofy, whatever and so we've got one actor that did just that and he did so well we just getting verbal cues, okay? And I'll do this, okay? And I'll scratch your head now look over there and so we've got one scene here and I've just got a garbage matt around it he's just on a green screen here and he's just looking around he's looking things, whatever and so I had to replicate him several times in the in this scene and so we started with just this one uh one pass again this is one where the lighting wasn't perfect is a portable green screen but we did what we could with it and the rest had to be done in post so I was able teo pullout whips take that other I was able to pull out a key from this uh turn on my key light there we go and that was my first pass of key light um let me go to a full resolution there there we go so that's clean it was clean but yet it was sharp I had to really work at it to make it work so I just I did the trick that I showed you earlier where I did a track matt and I duplicated it and then you see there's some green spill in there on his pants so I did do one hundred percent green removal from that layer so that's what I've got in here this key light the bottom layer has one hundred percent green to fifty five green so it did that just to pull that spill out of there and it also gives us a fuller softer result without the noise. So just do a short little bit of ram preview here I actually have a question comes sure if you great yeah so I'm prowling cayenne are both asking what is the best format kodak slash bit dub slash colors in color space for exchanging the results it ofwork in after effects with other applications uh boy that's tough because the workflow has changed so much in fact one of things I'm going to show you this afternoon is dynamic linking with premier where you can actually take a comp from an aftereffects file open it up and imported into premiere and actually bring it in like a video clip and be able to edit it directly as a cop so you could go back and forth you could see how it works in premiere and go yeah we got to move that a little bit go backto aftereffects tweak it save it in automatically updates so that's some of the cool dynamic linking with premier assed faras other other files file types as faras bringing them into after effects boy it's it's it's pretty amazing I think all of those kind of specs you confined on the adobe website uh that tell you the compatible file types I believe that's all up there and this far is going out uh exporting functions that especially now you can use adobe media encoder it's pretty it's pretty amazingly unlimited uh coming in and out there are very few limitations so so just to show here's just a few seconds of him just on the white background looking around and he's cool with everything okay so that was just one character so we had another one where we had a girl in here and she is in one scene she shows up and when the process happens the other group comes up and she's gone and she's like all sad and then using the other product yeah, she comes up and she's duplicated in the process and she's all happy and she's waving so that's what this little little scene here is, you know, she came in and she's happy and she was waving at her herself duplicate itself over there. Um then a couple other elements here that were created are inside after effects and this is just a three d arrow that was just a vector graphic arrow. Um that was extruded than the text was extruded. And so we've got a red one and a green one for the two different product types. So we've got two different scenes here because of this, we've got one where, uh the character comes in and she's not duplicated. What I wanted to do is get the group open here first to show you oh, here it is. John's group there ago. Okay, so this is pretty crazy. Um, let me do this. Select all there we go so we can see this. Okay, so let me back out because this was done on a much higher esmond it er what we have to work with here, so okay, so I've got all these guys out here, and what I did is because I showed you before I had that one piece of footage. We just let it roll the whole time. Um, like a couple minutes long or whatever. And then I used markers in on that. Uh, that one. That one roll. So here we go. Here it is. It goes up to five minutes. Five minutes. Stretch of video. You see, I put all these markers in here because that's when we said ok, now do this. Now do this. So he's looking around. Okay, now what? Okay, now scratch your head now turning scratch your head now, but your hand in your pocket look around, do that. So all these things that were telling him to do, I came in and put markers in. So when I brought in the files into here, I brought in that that, uh, sub comp, I just brought the one sub com in, uh, one time and then duplicated it. How many do we have in here? I've got forty, forty copies of him and I put them in three d space. Although I don't have a camera in here, I just have him in three d space so I could shove him in the background. That dealt with my scaling and everything it just moved everything in the right perspective the head levels everything was great I didn't have to mess with anchor points or anything it was great that's a great way of taking to d things uh and moving them in three d space so all I had to do is kind of move him side decide and then push him back in ze space so again, this is another a case where I've got video uh there uh actually, uh not just the whole video with the white backgrounds the white background is transparent here but we've got the video extractions off this guy and you'll see all these markers here on the right I don't think I've got any parenting in here, so let me hide this column it gives us a little more of this space here and drag this in a bit so I want to see more of our time line okay, so you can see all these markers out here. I tried to randomize him. I first started off, you know, with like one, two, three, four, five on dh scattered around and then as I go down the lining see, I scatter more and more and more so what I was trying to do is push do him a line at a time do a few guys in front then do another one and pushing the next row back in the next row back and I just kind of did that to feel in all the space in between heads and then went through and randomised them a bit so let's say this is at low resolution so it should render a couple seconds here without being too painful um just a little render there so they're all doing something different I'm going to show you a little clip of the whole thing at the end here anyway so I've added that group in again I'm nesting sub calms so that wass ah whole group of sub calms this was my original right here that's one comp that was the actual green screen shot so I didn't have to do that over and over again fifty times forty times I just did it once and then brought it in here stack him in his layers those air all sub calms and now I've taken that sub comp and I've brought it into another master cop where they are moving in three d space where I actually did a little tweak here with um so let me see if I can render out just the first couple seconds or so here where you see them pop in I'm waiting for our other character to pop into she should be popping in any second now so in it all matches you know the voice over that explaining what's going on here and it's fun it was over the top which is what gets attention these days especially topic like that that is, you know, it's very narrow market, right? And they want teo they want to express it, okay? We aren't seeing her pop up just now so we can see them pop up so that's just a little animation of that group popping up here and that's the first group so if we look at our position in scale, I actually tweaked the scale t long gate it so it's smaller down here and then I elongated it a bit as it popped up and all this is kind of like a subjective move like we did with the basketball you see how everything relates now, why did I start with the goofy little ball bouncing? Because if you can make that happen, you can do this see it all relates to just basic basic key framing basic movements, but now you're doing it with other elements I'm treating this layer the exactly the same as I would the basketball are pineapple or whatever you know you're just taking something that's already animated and you're moving that animation into another animation so you're just nesting things you're repeating the same things over and over again, so if you could do the basketball or the pineapple or any of that you can do this, too. So once you get your green screen composite done, so let me see if I've got just a little area here. I think she pops in right about in here, maybe not trying to think it's thinking thinking. Okay, there it is. There we go. So she's already popped in this arrow pops in and everything. I think I've got the rendered version here. I can show some of it. Um, maybe it's in here. So let me just open this up and scrub through to that point and he'll be able to see we're going to see we're going to see more of it this afternoon, but here we go and turn the sound off for now. Okay, so I'm going to leave this at full screen, and that way I can scrub through it and move this down here. Okay? So there they pop up, she pops up, and then the arrow pops out around them. The second group pops up, she's disappointed that she didn't get duplicated using the new stuff, which is great, she gets duplicated, everybody's happy she's, all excited. And, you know, it's, another clip and she's all very happy that she got it accepted into the group.

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Ratings and Reviews

jackflash
 

Jeff Foster seems like a great, knowledgeable guy. But this course is so disappointing. The classes are disorganized, convoluted yet shallow, and waste an awful lot of time. And they’re just lectures — you’re just watching him do stuff — no lessons where you can work along with him to really absorb what’s going on. My biggest complaints are 1) It seems like he didn’t prepare very much, so we end up watching him go through features one by one, sometimes just to try to find the thing that’s going to illustrate the point he’s trying to make; and 2) he’s unnecessarily confusing. Here’s an easy example. In the “parenting” class, which hinges on one layer’s relationship to another, he created identical layers and named them identically. So he’s explaining that “blue solid” is the parent to “blue solid.” And then he proceeds to discuss the layers, which are numbered #1, #2, #3, by calling them “the first layer” (#3), “the second layer” (#2), and “the third layer” (#1.) After Effects is complicated enough! Maybe I’m spoiled by having learned Illustrator with a wonderful Creative Live course. This is not that.

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