- [Instructor] Hello, and welcome to this tutorial series
Pulling the Perfect Key in DaVinci Resolve.
My name is Ben Brownlee from Boris FX,
and in this short tutorial series,
we're going to be looking at how we pull the perfect key
using Primatte Studio.
And over the next few videos,
I'm going to be taking you through my checklist,
on how I approach a green screen key.
And we're gonna break this down into several steps
including the primary key,
the importance of spill suppression,
hold in and hold out mattes,
doing our primary color balance,
creating matching effects for the background,
and then tying it all together with some finishing touches.
And we're not just gonna be learning
about Borises Primatte Studio,
I'm also gonna be be taking you
through some little workflow tips and tricks
for working in Resolve itself.
So without any further ado, let's start off with our shot.
And the first thing I always do
is actually play the shot back, and just try to identify
any potential problems that we're going to have with it.
And straight away, I can see that there's a few issues
with this particular piece of footage.
It's not bad, but we have some troubling areas.
To begin with, we have fine hair details.
That's always a bit tricky.
So we're going to have to try and worry about
keeping those in as we go.
The next thing is, well actually probably the biggest thing
that I can see from now, is having an uneven green screen.
So, we don't have a nice flat single color
that we're going to have to pull a key from.
We've actually got a few different tones in here as well.
The next thing to note about the background
is that the actual background doesn't extend
all the way to the edges.
We've got a little bit of a gap here,
that's not too bad that's fine.
And if we play the clip through a little bit,
we can see that we do also have, we look at the sword here,
we have a reflection of the green screen
in the sword as well.
So that could cause us a few issues later.
So with this in mind, let's see how we start up
our keying process.
Now in Resolve, we can be applying effects,
either in the edit room, where we are now,
and as you can see, I have my list of filters all here,
including Primatte Studio,
which we're going to be looking for in the keying.
But as of Resolve 16, we can't be applying effects
that create an alpha channel in the Edit page
in the Edit room.
But just so you're aware of how I've got my clip set up
a the moment, I've got my background on video track one,
which is just a still frame
taken from a long clip.
And I've got my green screen over the top
on video track two.
Let's pop in to the color room.
And I've got my timeline turned on,
because I want to make sure that I am actually selecting
the top clip, the clip that's on video track two.
And I am.
So let's open up the nodes.
I'm not gonna do any color correction on the first node,
but I want to have the opportunity to come back
and do something to it later.
So the first thing I'm going to do
is actually come in and add a new serial node.
and this is the one that I'm going to add my Primatte to.
So if I give this a node label, I'm going to call this one
Primatte Studio.
And i'll come in to open up my open effects,
i'll just tap in Primatte, misspelled of course,
just having that in the search option
gives me enough information to grab the filter
and put it over the top.
Now just so that I've got a bit more space,
I'm going to turn my nodes off again.
And with Boris Effects Primatte Studio,
we have a UI that lets us do much of the work
without even touching the settings on the right hand side.
And this is very important,
because there are a lot of settings that we can be
working with in Primatte Studio.
It's not just a simple color keyer,
we can do a whole lot more with it.
And coming over to the UI, we can move this around
just by clicking and dragging anywhere inside of it.
And I'll just place it over on the right hand side here.
And it's set up so that generally speaking,
we start from the top and work our way downwards.
So the first thing to do is click on Auto Analyze.
And this makes Primatte Studio have a little look
at our footage and guess what color we want to key out.
If you want a blue screen or green screen,
it's going to make a decent guess right from the get go.
If that's not working, we can always click on
the manual sample background there,
and then just click in the viewer anywhere here.
But despite appearances,
I'm actually happy with how things are right now.
But you got to admit, it looks a bit of a mess.
And again, this is because of the way that Resolve
handles alpha channels.
Gonna open my nodes up and anywhere in the blank area
of the node tree, I'm going to just right click and go
Add Alpha Output.
This gives me a little dot that I can now
pipe the alpha channel from my Primatte Studio into,
but still nothing's changed.
So we have to do one last thing.
And that's tell Resolve that we want to use
the alpha channel from the OFX plugin.
So I'm going to right click on my Primatte Studio node
and go Use OFX Alpha.
And now, as if by magic,
our clip is looking a lot better placed.
And if I play that back, you can see it's not perfect yet,
not by far, you know, we can still see
some of the stripes in the background there.
But It's actually shaping up into something,
at least we can see our forest in the background.
Okay, so let's work down this UI.
We have two buttons here that's a Point and Rect
for rectangle.
And these control how we sample the rest of
Primatte Studios tools.
So I want to clean up the background.
So with Clean Background selected, I can just click
and drag, you see because I've got point turned on,
the Primatte Studio draws a point
where my mouse cursor has gone.
And if I lift the button,
it will then clean up the background.
So far so good.
But I want to show another little trick
to get you a better key from the get go.
And that's not to look at it in the final composite mode.
Or even the final matte mode,
which lets us see the alpha channel.
Instead, let's have a look at the Matte Status mode.
And because I'm done with the nodes again,
I'm just gonna hide those nodes
so that we've got a bit more space for our viewer.
So looking back at this slightly larger viewer now,
we've got three colors in the Matte Status,
we have white, where everything is completely opaque.
So, the pixel is completely opaque.
We have black, where the pixel is completely transparent.
We have gray, where the pixel
is neither completely transparent, or completely opaque.
So this helps us look for areas on the image.
And the background where I might need to just
draw a little bit more to clean that background up.
Maybe a little bit there.
So the great thing about Matte Status
is that some of these pixels might be almost transparent,
but not quite.
And sort of fool us into thinking that it's a perfect key.
With the Matte Status, there's no hiding.
Now looking at this now, I also want to clear up
what's happening with the shield
and maybe some of the bits that's happening
inside the face as well.
And for this, I need to clean the foreground.
I'm also going to change my sample from point to rectangle,
just so I can show you what's going on there.
So if I click and drag with a rectangle,
Primatte Studios actually going to sample
all of the stuff within that rectangle,
and then use those values to help clean the foreground.
Excellent.
So I'm going to play this through.
Just to see if I'm missing anything big.
And you can see we've got a few bits on the sword here.
But we know from when we looked back at the shot
to begin with, that this is probably reflections.
So I'm fine with that.
We've got a little bit on the face
there and there, may be a few pixels there.
So might come in and just draw over those a little bit
just see if I can clean those up.
And I've got a little bit over here as well.
So i'll just clean that up there.
I can also see underneath the hand, I need to clean up
a bit more the background color.
We'll just take that just little bit here.
Now I don't want to be too aggressive at this time.
Because I want to keep in a lot of this hair detail.
And over the course of this series,
I'm going to be paying particular attention to the hair.
And the reason for that is the hair and other fine details
are some of the most difficult things
that you're going to get to key.
And it's also what helps to make or break the composite.
So if you've got horrible spider legs
instead of hair that's going to be a dead giveaway.
But for now, I'm pretty happy I think.
I'm going to have a look my final Matte.
Yep, I can see that I've got good amount of hair detail
still in here.
Zoom out a little bit there.
Play that through.
That's looking quite nice.
Generally speaking, my subject is looking pretty good,
I've got a little bit of their reflection
that we were talking about earlier.
And I've got a little bit of stuff still happening
in the background.
But if I look at the final composite,
but basically doing four clicks
that probably would have taken about 20 seconds
to do real time, It's not looking too bad.
My goal here is to get a good base for us to build on
with the next few steps.
So at this stage I don't want to be too aggressive
and try to clean up more background here, undo that,
or come into close and get every single little detail fixed
with one click.
That's just not going to happen.
We've got a decent looking Primary Matte.
We've got aour nodes set up correctly.
And we're ready to continue.
And in the next exercise we're going to be looking
in more detail at the hair and the importance
of spill suppression.
My name is Ben Brownlee from Boris FX,
and I look forward to seeing you again in part two
of Pulling the Perfect Key in DaVinci Resolve.
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