From the course: Green Screen Techniques for Video and Photography

Checking test keys on set

From the course: Green Screen Techniques for Video and Photography

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Checking test keys on set

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- While post-production normally happens later in the cycle it's still a good idea to bring a laptop on set. This way you can check things and make sure that the footage and photos that you're capturing are looking great. One of the coolest things is you can just take the memory card right out of the camera, and plug it directly into your computer, or use a card-reader if necessary. Now, let's use a program like Adobe After Effects. It's a bit complex, but it's really forgiving when it comes to green screen footage. What I'll do is, from the window menu here, I'll choose the media browser. This lets me navigate directly to the memory card and I can just click, and start to open. What I'm going to do here, is select one of my clips and just double-click. And you see it loads it into my project, ready to go. Now, we just need to drop that footage into a composition. I can right-click and make a new comp. Or think of it as a sequence from the file. Now, let's press "r" for rotation, and just rotate the shot -90 degrees. You see we have a lot of flexibility here as we're working. And I could adjust that shot up or down in the frame as needed to frame it up. Now, I'll put a photograph behind so I have a reference source. In this case, I've got a file of a nice beach shot. I just imported a still image but you can use any sort of backdrop that you want to use for testing. We can select the footage here and start to key. Let's go over to the effects panel. I just type in the word "key" as in chroma key or green screen key, and it shows me a bunch of useful presets. Here's one called keylight and advanced spill suppression. I'll drag-and-drop that right onto my footage. Now, it's just a simple step by step recipe. Take the eyedropper and click on the green. And you see it mostly disappears. I'm going to turn off that backdrop for a second, and you might notice a little bit of noise in there. This is even easier to see if we switch this to view the screen matte. Now what I notice is that the black areas, which are meant to be transparent, aren't fully transparent. So I could just come down to my screen matte controls and adjust the clipping black control here, to make that a little bit darker. And now it goes, nice and clean. As we drag through we get a pretty good idea about the subject and how it's looking. Later on we could refine this, but this, all-in-all is pretty simple. I'll just switch that back to intermediate result, and turn my backdrop back on, and you'll see that we've got our initial key. Let's just adjust that backdrop a little bit. There we go, and we'll nudge it's position so we see the ground. Good. And because there's a wealth of color and options back there I can really see what's happening. If I press "ctrl +" to zoom in, we can take the hand tool here to reposition the frame, and I'm just paying attention to details like the hair. This isn't the final key, but I see with the movement and everything else, that it's working very nicely. So, this is a good test key. I could feel confident that the settings we've been using on set are working. My suggestion is as soon as you feel like you've got it right, in camera, pop that memory card out and just give it a quick check in the computer. It's a larger screen, and the software's right there. You'll immediately know if it's working, after just a few seconds.

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