From the course: Green Screen Techniques for Video and Photography

An introduction to keying in Premiere Pro

From the course: Green Screen Techniques for Video and Photography

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An introduction to keying in Premiere Pro

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- Let's get started with keying inside of Adobe Premiere Pro, to make things a little bit easier I've already set up the project file. From the exercise files on your disk, be sure to open up the keying start project for Premiere Pro. This contains a few pieces of footage. So things look the same, let's also switch to the editing workspace. And I'll choose window, workspaces, Reset to saved layout. Now we should have the default workspaces loaded. Let's begin by loading our green screen clip. I can do this by double-clicking to place it into the source monitor. In this case, I want to use the part of the shot where she's beginning to move. So, we'll take it from just before the turn, and mark an in point by pressing the "i" key. We'll drag through the clip, and let her land, and press the "o" key to mark our out. Now that we've got the clip marked, we need to add it to a sequence. This is going to contain multiple clips for the composite. I can do this quickly by just dragging it into the timeline here and it will create a new sequence for the clip. However, you'll notice that the video track is on track one. What I need to do is drag that up to track two here so it's on it's own level. Now, we can double-click on the beach clip to load it as well. In this case, I see a locked off shot of a beach. And I'm going to add this to the timeline. I simply drag it in, and I can see that it's a bit long. So let's mark out an in and out point first. In the timeline, I'll press the "x" key, but I need to highlight track two, so it knows what to select. Now, the "x" key marks the duration for that clip. Let's target track one and click the overwrite button to add that clip into the sequence. Now what we have is the green screen clip composited over the background, and we simply need to do a key. To do this, click on the effects panel and in the search box, type in the word "key" and you'll see that it begins to locate keying effects. Let's select the ultra key here, I can tell it's an accelerated effect because of the icon. Let's drag that on top of the effect. Now, I'll double-click on the shot to load it and take a look at the effect controls. Now with the effect applied, we just need to identify what we want to key. Fortunately, this footage is shot very evenly, so it should be pretty easy to key the footage. The first thing we need to do is take the matte color and eyedropper near her hair, on the green. This selects the green color and generates a new mask. You can see that a bit better if you look at the alpha channel. And now you can better judge where the transparency is. I see that we have a little bit of reflection from her body there on the background, you can notice that it's creating some brighter areas as she moves through the light, and a little bit up here in the corners. But one of the first things I'm going to do is remove any part of the footage that isn't necessary. To do this, we'll add a garbage matte, basic transparency, this could be done with the opacity effect. I'll come back up to opacity, and double-click to add a box. Now, let's just position that by dragging the corners here. If necessary, you can zoom out a little bit so you can see more. Just set the zoom to 25% or so. And you should be able to view the corners. Now, as we drag through, I'm just looking that her body doesn't intersect with any of the corners. That looks pretty good, I can even tighten it up just a little. Now, we can go back to the ultra effect and refine the key. Let's take a look at the matte clean up controls. What I'm going to do is increase the shadow slider, and decrease it, so you can see that those gray areas become a pure black. And if necessary, you can also adjust the highlight control. Now, let's also put a little feather on that. I'll come to soften and apply a two pixel feather. Now we can switch this back to the composite view and take this back in to fit. Let's play that and watch it in real time. That's looking good, the areas around her have been made transparent and we have a pretty good key. The colors are a bit off, but we'll tackle that next.

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