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Lesson Info

Green Screen Effects and Exporting

In video, the easiest way to knock out a background is toe photograph your talent in front of a green and sometimes blue screen green is the most popular they originally existed because green was better for film and blue was better for video based upon the technology of the time. But if you look at juman myself and jack, all three of us like wearing blue shirts and most people do because skin looks good against blue, it doesn't look so good against green, so most people were wearing blue in front of a blue screen and suddenly bodies were disappearing. It was terrible, so we've pretty well standardized on green because the software has improved and we can knock out any color you could key against a red background as far as that's concerned, especially if you're working with the guam is but for people, read is a bad choice, and green is a good choice. You always stack clips with the green screen on top of the background, and although there are a number of green screen effects inside prem...

ier, the one that I recommend you uses in video effects teeing all the way at the bottom, it's called ultra key grab all tricky and drag it on top of the clip that contains the green background, and when you do that, nothing changes because it doesn't know what key color you're keying out under all turkey, which is inside effect controls go to key color, click the eyedropper and sample the green near but not next to the person's hair and or face. If you get too close, you're going to get hair in there and it's going to screw up the color, but you don't want to be down near their feet because nobody looks at an actor's feet when they're looking at an actor, they're always looking at their face, so you want to sample the green about a quarter of an inch away from their eyes? As close as you can get she's got big hair, we can't get that close click on it and that quickly we've now gone toe akio you where justus a single click we've got that to be pretty darn close, we could make some adjustments to it. We got a lot of green highlight going in here, which we want to get rid of, so we'll go to matt cleanup composite means that we're seeing the finished effect alfa channel means that we are looking at that which is opaque white and that which is transparent black. The goal in any kind of a key, especially a green screen key is you want that which is for ground to be solid white. You want that which is background and transparent to be solid black, and you want as few shades of gray as possible shades of grey is where your key is falling apart so you can click, hold and drag and what you're looking for is you're looking to get the best possible, the best possible, um solid white so that there's no shades of gray and you would do that under matt cleanup, then switch back to composite and twirl down spill suppression, and that will get rid of the green edging, so we're just going to click, hold and drag and just drag notice how the green is there and now it's gone to magenta. We want to find the point where we get rid of all the green and the hair is a normal color without too much magenta cast, and this varies on a key by key basis that clean up to make sure that you've got solid white, solid block and spill suppression to get rid of the green halo in her hair or green halo around the edges of an object. Now that was a really good key. If we looked at it, she had a really solid background, not all keys of that good, and you have to make more adjustments when the lighting is bad. But one thing that we used to think about is that we used to think that we could not key that we could not like a background separate from a foreground here this is what I call it and see a shot this is lisa she's got a beautifully even key look at how smooth and clean that is there's no ripples there's no folds it's a painted background if there's no texture it's evenly lit right around fifty percent gray for those of you that know how to read scopes it is really cool but she is extremely high contrast there's a lot of dark here there is no relationship between how you liked the foreground image and how you like the background the background needs to be smooth and flat the foreground could be dramatic again select the clip grabbed the ultra key dragon on top click the eyedropper click near but not at the face and look at that with one click we've got lisa being the malevolent victim the malevolent evildoer staring at us about to do some dastardly deed look at that and she reflects the night look at the glow on her hair coming from the orange lights on the right the reflection here coming from the whiter amber lights over here in fact what I'm going to do now is go back up to the top, go to motion, take her horizontal position and move her over but there's, I don't see the rest of her frame, so I've got complete control over where she gets put and because I want to have this looked like it was shot with with a dslr camera, I'm going to select my background, which is the yarra river and melbourne when you select the background, go up two blurs, apply a gaussian blur right in here and just blur that background a little bit. So now, as lisa turns and looks at us, you buy that in a heartbeat that she was in melbourne standing on a bridge overlooking the river staring at us got to admit that is a very, very cool effect. We can key out green screen in video and without having to do it on a ninja wolf individual frame by frame basis, we can have it look and pick up all the color of the background and make it look really, really cool. Exporting is the process of taking whatever you've created inside the timeline and creating a single file with it. A master file now there's two schools of thought here school of thought number one is that you want to export and compress the file all at the same time say you're going posted to the web or going posted to youtube or posted to your own personal website created dvd or a blue wave with that I disagree with that approach. My philosophy is I want to create the highest possible quality master file coming out of premier use that master file so I don't have to keep going back into premier whenever I need to make new copies whenever we export a file out of premiere we are always using a different piece of software called adobe media and coder adobe media encoder is specifically charged with the compression conversion ofthe software of our video from ah high resolution format to a low resolution format or creating a master file so let's say that I want to export thes to chroma key shots or I want to export what I wanna explore export to chroma key shots you go up to the file menu you go down to export and we always select media file export media after a few seconds adobe media and coder opens in the background and opens the export settings on the left hand side we're able to specify what we want to have exported that's just there we go, I'm going to scale this so it fills two full four by three frame if I go down here we could type the letter I to set it in we could type the letter o to set it out and we could create just a small test version of our movie but I wanted instead ex export the entire sequence here's the secret right here, right in the top right corner. When you check match sequence settings, you will always export the highest possible quality that matches your sequence. I recommend you do this and then as a separate past, take it back into adobe median coder and compress for the web. And the reason is we always need multiple formats. I need a quick time version. I did an mpeg four version. I need a version from my web site and a higher bit rate version for youtube. I need something for dvd. I need something for blue, right? All of a sudden you've got all these different generations that have to be created off the single master file. By exporting the master file, I never have to go back into premiere. More importantly, I don't have to be the one that does the compression. I can give the compression to somebody else in the office to be able to be my compression expert. While I can focus on getting the editing done or even more, I could set up a watch folder inside media encoder. Drop it into the watch boulder have the entire compression process automated by median coder without me having to do anything but I have to start with high quality master file if I export using compressed setting. You can't re compress a compressed file, which means I have to go back into premier open up, render anything that happens to be to have lost rendering, re output everything just make sure my media hasn't become unlinked, which it never does overnight but easily does if I have to wait two or three months between working with the project take all that stress away export a master file the rest of the settings all become inactive because what this does is it says forget compression just export amassed servile use maximum render quality we can ignore that unless we're working with ten bit video most cameras don't shoot ten bit video it's a non issue use previews means toe work with rendered with the render files that already exist in premiere this will be faster on checking it'll rear ender which tends to be more accurate this should only be used for ten bit video frame blending is only used when you're using slow motion that should always be off and you don't want it imported into the project. In general you want all four of these not checked if you are queuing up a bunch of videos you want to catch them all at the same time, click q otherwise if you're just doing one video click export I'm going to click export and it says I'm exporting the video and it's done and so now you may ask yourself, where is it? I'm not sure actually so let's, just see if we can figure this out together. Let's, go, teo. There it is, it's on the desktop double click it to load it up into quick time. We created a standard def video space bar to play it. Notice that it is our green screen, and there is our two videos. Our project was an mpeg to project the data sizes six and a half megabytes, it's running at thirty, frames a second, and we're done. Is that not cool or what? Keep it simple. Then in another training, I'll come back and talk about video compression. But for now, you want to get it out of premier at the absolute highest quality, the absolute fastest, and be able to reuse that time and time again to be able to create a cz many different versions. What you need.