Skip to main content

Advanced Skills: Green Screen

Lesson 30 from: Final Cut Pro X Bootcamp

Abba Shapiro

Advanced Skills: Green Screen

Lesson 30 from: Final Cut Pro X Bootcamp

Abba Shapiro

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

Lesson Info

30. Advanced Skills: Green Screen

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

12:34
2

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Navigating the Interface

32:32
3

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Project Timeline

18:23
4

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Basic Editing

16:07
5

Refining Your Edit Introduction

15:15
6

Refining Your Edit: Trimming

37:06
7

Refining Your Edit: J and L Cuts

09:00
8

Refining Your Edit: Roll and Overwrite Edits

06:25

Lesson Info

Advanced Skills: Green Screen

we're gonna finish off with green screen. So we have two shots. I have both a still photograph and some video. And my biggest challenge in demonstrating this is that it is such a good Keir that a lot of times I can't show how to do anything because it's already done. But I'll give you a little bit of a hint. So I have a still image here. Let's go ahead and open this up so sometimes you might have a photograph. You want a key on the ideas you're removing? Ah, color in this case, a green background because you want to put this person over a different background. So maybe you have a photographing people do this in photo shop. And so you say, Well, why would I do it in photo shop? But maybe you need to cure over a moving background, you know, put in the corner or something. So I want to do with this still and then I also have a shot here video, and it's a challenge because she has very fine right here. So how do we do that? Well, the first thing we want to do is we want to put them over so...

me sort of a background. We learned earlier that there's the generators tap, so let's go ahead and generate a background. Uh, I'm gonna make this hard on me. I'm gonna choose would. And the reason I'm gonna choose would is because it's a very different color. Should show all the bad parts. Paula, get myself in trouble for that. So I learned that I could either use the Cukor could drag it. I'm dragging it below. Even though this is on the main storyline, I need to put something behind it. Okay, normally, connect clips above. Now we're connecting it below, so I will see through the green to her. I'll select the clip. I'll go over here to my filters. I'm gonna type in the word key and you'll see there's a couple things. There's a Keir and a looming here. We're using the Keir that allows us to deal with color, luminous and saturation Louima you would use if you're doing it. Really want to keep out black or white? Sometimes you might be given like fireworks. You might want to take out the black. You could also use a screen motor blending mode um, Or maybe you're given a graphic and you want to take out the white or the black, so it's transparent. Looming tears are great for that, but we're gonna use the regular here, so I haven't selected him in a double click, and immediately it applies it and does its best guess, which it did a pretty good job on. So let's show how it it does. It's thinking. So here we go. That is the filter on the clip, and you can control this. A bunch of sliders. You know how much it's kind of transparent, how hard it's gonna threshold of that so you can work with that. But what's important is, and I'm going to switch over this little button. Here is the mask. So what we ideally want to do when we're keying is we want to have solid black and solid white and even a solid black. You'll see through it and you'll see the background, anything that's white, the image sticks, do I think of is like if you threw cheese at the moon, I throw cheese the cheese. Where do I come from? But if you throw something at the moon and whatever hits the moon sticks to it and the black of space, it just keeps going. Okay, So the white stuff is what you always want to work, By the way, you can invert this very easily with a button referencing my earlier part of class where I blanked out. But there is an option to invert your mat invert, but also So the idea is you want these to be pretty clean edges. If they're too sharp to clean, you might get that like helmet head. She has a pretty you know, Her hair is already pretty, you know, matted down. But if there's a gray area that's gonna be translucent and sometimes you actually like that I mean, I've had, like, a glass of water that I shot on a green screen, and you want able to see through the glass, but not completely so, ideally, with her solid black, solid white. You don't want anything in the middle of she had green eyes on. You need you'll need to compensate for that or if there was like a green element on a shirt. So that's the idea. Let's go ahead and switch that back to our original and if I needed to adjust this, I have little boxes right here. I want to tell it what to take out, what color to take out. So I would click on this and I would draw box and say, Remove that and then if I want to do another box, I could go ahead and draw that. So it's looking at these areas and determining how saturated the areas. And by the way, I'm gonna turn this off, is really looking at this, which is what I should have done because I went out of the box. But it's looking at all the variations of green how saturated it is, and ideally, when you shoot a green screen, you want it to be as even as possible. So if you're shooting a green screen, is that the 32nd tip? You want the person to be as far away from the background as possible so it doesn't bounce on them, and you want your camera to be as far away from the person on the background as possible. So here's your camera. Here's your person. Here is green screen. You can like them individually. You like the background by itself, and you light it evenly. Get rid of the people in the camera for a moment. Sorry about that. And when you're lighting the backward, that was pretty funny. And when you're liking the background, what I like to do is a light it. And then I'll use the iris on my camera and I'll dialect just so I start seeing either The Zebra stripes are the blink ease, and now, because I can see exactly where it's at 100% I could start relighting it. So I see consistent blink, ease, consistency for stripes and then Iris back down to where it should be. Bring the people back in okay, there well lit. The reason I put the cameras far away as possible. It does two things for me. It reduces my field of view so I don't need a real big green screen. The second thing it does is I can control my depth of field so that green screen, if it's a little wrinkly, is that a focus? So it's smoother. So there's the one minute how to shoot green screen to do better. Better? I think he's here. So the idea is that can draw that and I tell it, What colors? Let's go to the video once the sacks same thing and actually do this. So here we have another one. And again, she's not covering the whole image that we not only have do fix. The green screen will also do a mask. So I grabbed the tear. Drop it on once again. Does too good of a job. Let's go ahead, close this window. Get this nice and big. So if I play this, it's pretty good. But I do see some issues there first, and then she escapes. So let's go ahead. It's like this shift to go from that out. So we have this area here and I want to look at the mask. I'm going to click on the mask and I can see if there's a problem. I can see that. Actually, that's not really getting keyed out that well. OK, that's a little transfer, little opaque to get rid of this other ones. We don't jump to it. I'll just be good and I got to it. But when I play that you made also notice something's kind of shift, there's a little bit of noise there. So that's when I would come back and I would start selecting the area. Now it doesn't have to be back on the original green for me to say this is part of what you need to figure out, okay? And I select here and said This is also part of the color you need to figure it guesses green first or blue if it sees those colors, if it's another color or something, you didn't quite get green. Your client came up with a ah green tarp from the hardware store and, um, said We'll just use it and I'll pay you $100,000 fee. Yeah, I'm gonna shoot for $100,000. But this is how you choose the colors once you've done that and you notice after start picking up her green eyes a little bit. But before that, if I switch back to the actual key, it's going to be a little cleaner because I'm not having that area over there. The other thing is, sometimes you have areas where you have a lot of fine stuff happening. I'm going to switch this over to ah, 100% Gloucester, but moved it somewhere he's chroma. Key bottles can't keep him straight. Okay, so there we have that. And if I'm getting a lot of like edge issues there, there's an edge option, and you should use this and make it a pretty short line. But you're like, OK, this is an area where it's hard to read the key. Okay, you need to start making sure, and then this will allow you to play with your edge a little better so that you can get a nice, smooth edge. Let's go ahead and switch that back and scroll up, so this is going to give me a little bit cleaner of a key. That's what it's force of your primary areas, the squares, the big chunks, the edges. And that's gonna be just for smoothing. You want it to be relatively small area. You don't want to go from like here to there, because that's going to give you, ah, threshold. That's much more too soft on. You'll just see things coming and going, and then what? You can dio and I'll zoom into this area's. Her eyes were green and actually we're seeing a little bit of the if I go ahead and I go back to this, it's actually gonna be cutting through there a little bit. And I need to up my special. So now, So I have her eyes. So the other areas here that you can work with, for instance, is there's a fill holes option. So that's gonna do its best job to kind of find things to make that solid. Okay, so now her eyes should no longer be yellow. They should be the green color that they are. Okay. And then you also have edged distance, and that's gonna be like another term that we use is, um, not edge distance, but ah, not feather. It's a word. I'm out of words. I've used too many words this week. It will come to me, but we'll just call it edge distance from now, because that's what they call it here. But basically, it brings it in a little mask in a little tighter to the person, or left it out a little bit. So sometimes you do a mask, you see son of a halo, Sometimes it just tightens it up. Okay. Ah, And then you also have the option to soften it because that is more natural, so you don't get the hard line. The other things it does is something called Spill and does this automatically. So when you're keying, often the background does get onto their edges. So what they do is they picked the opposite color of green, and they apply that, and then they basically make it. So it's black and white so that you don't see like this green halo, and you don't have to squeeze it in so much, so spill is automatic, but you can play with that as we go down here. You saw the invert button. Basically, if I wanted her to be the wood, I could go ahead and invert that. It's also a good way to see what's disappearing if you have fine hair disappearing and don't worry about color selection. Color selection is if you wanted to manually choose this range of color and you say, Okay, it's gonna be this variance of green. It's going to be this luminous level, and you can manually dial it in. But it does a pretty good job there, so go ahead and close that I just want you to be aware of what that does, um, again, this is the map shrinking and expanding it tightening so you could go this there's your feather. OK, spill suppression. But what's really cool is at the bottom. And it's like rap. And what light wrap will do is on the very edges. It will look at the background that you're putting under it, and it will take that. And that light will affect the edges of the person to make it more natural. Okay, it's kind of it's that it's as if they were getting hit by the light of whatever that sources, and that's pretty nice. That's a pretty advanced feature, and you can play with that to smooth it out Now. One thing to keep in mind is if I was king her over something other than this wall, like if I was putting her into an environment, it's important that the background and the foreground kind of look the same. On one of the things is gamma. You heard term gamma. That's basically how black is red. Okay, so the gamma needs to match, so you might need to color correct the images so they match on that foot really sells a key is that the lighting needs to be right and the colors need to match. The background of the background has rich blacks, and she's like Gray not gonna work. But it's great. It's really easy to do. I'll tell you nine times out of 10 it's Dragon dropped for me. I never need to go into anything. I switch over to the just looking at the mask and play so I can see if anything pops up. And if it does, I'll fix it at that point. So it's a good thing to keep in mind. And that's how you would key something in final cut pro 10. So there you go. There are some great advanced skills, and hopefully, uh, you're excited about trying these out.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Keyboard Shortcuts
Project Files - Dancer Media - Part 1 of 2 (Large Download 2.13 GB)
Project Files - Dancer Media - Part 2 of 2 (Large Download 1.88 GB)
Project Files - Green Screen

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Wonderful. This is the first time I've seen any of Abba's classes, and he's a great teacher. I've been watching the live sessions for the past few days and have picked up a ton of great tips that will indeed speed up my workflow in FCPX. He's a great teacher, and does a wonderful job of setting people at ease, ie. where he says things like, 'there's no trick questions', and times where he will click on something wrong, then he'll go back and show his mistake (pointing out his minor mistakes are actually a beneficial lesson). In all, wonderful wonderful wonderful. Thank you!

Lara
 

Fantastic teacher. I enjoyed every video, super worth it. I've been reluctant to jump into FCP X since it got upgraded from FCP. Now I feel confident to work with it again. Seems pretty self explanatory, but I am glad I watched the course. Abba covers pretty much everything you need to know. I also loved his personality, made me want to learn more each day.

Alan Pole
 

Absolutely brilliant. Abba gets to the point, is clear, organized and articulate, and lays it all out in a manner that quickly brings your confidence level from zero to hero. Highly recommend this to any photographer who wants to blog, build ads, or include video in their offering. I feel like an amazing new world has been provided to me. Thank you!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES