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Chromakeying in Hollywood films has always intrigued me.
Every time I see one of those “behind the scenes” videos
I keep wondering: how the hell did they pulled off that green key?
For what I've learned, you should always avoid wrinkles in your green screen,
make sure it's evenly lit and that your talent is definitely not wearing any green.
And then you see these behind the scenes of big Hollywood films
where it seems that they don’t care about those things.
I mean, look at these guys from the Godzilla film!
Green soldiers, one of them is holding a green bazooka
in front of a green screen!
Still, they're able to pull off a perfect key from that.
Or this shot here which comes from an incredible music video by Leningrad,
Did they simply throw that green-screen there from a distance?
I mean, how many shades of green can you have?
So then, what's the secret?
At this point I still don't know and I want to figure it out.
And the fact that you’re watching this video
means that I did found some really useful tips, so let's see what they are!
[Cinecom's intro music]
Hey folks, Jordy here for cinecom.net and welcome to Creative Tuesday.
But today I want to figure out how to pull the perfect key,
so, to do that we got Yannick in a green army suit,
he’s also gonna wear a blonde wig and, of course, hold a gun
to make it look real.
The idea is to pull a key with one simple click in post-production
and maybe do some minor adjustments, but that's it.
You want to focus on the stuff that we can do during the shoot
to make the keying go easier.
Before we start with that, I'd first like to make a big shout out
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Tip number 1, let's go over all the basics first.
To start off you want to make sure that your green screen is tight,
that means no wrinkles that will only create shadows.
And yes, big productions don't always seem to care about that,
but we'll get into that later.
Next up is lighting, don't make hot spots or gradients.
Do your best to add the same intensity of lighting across the entire green-screen.
Tools like false color or even the simple waveforms can help with that.
A curved line means that you have a hot spot,
so move your lights around until you have a straight line on your waveform.
Your green screen should be considered as a zone
and your subject should not come in that zone.
Or else the green will spill on your talent.
We talk about creating two zones,
one for the green screen and one for the other lighting setup
that is for your talent.
And finally is the shutter speed.
Motion blur is very hard to key, so by setting a faster shutter speed
you can reduce that motion blur.
So, of course you do have to understand
that that will also change the look and feel of your shots.
So those were the basics, when you got those things right
you're starting off with a solid setup.
Tip number 2!
This one and the next step is something that I got from KINETEK.
Probably the most underrated channel here on YouTube,
if you actually want to learn something from cinematography,
just stop watching us and check out this channel.
No, please don’t.
Mathew, the guy behind KINETEK talked about the luminance of the green.
Every color has a specific luminance value,
like yellow sits above 60%, red a little bit above 20
and green is about 45%.
That is true green and will give you the least interference with other colors
or even other tints of green.
Here you can see Yannick with his green suit.
Currently on the waveform we can see
that the background and the suit come in each others luminance value.
So when making the background brighter we can lift that green to above 40%.
After that, we decrease the intensity of the lights on the talent
which, as you can see, separates the two greens.
At the same time we'll also have a better green from the green screen.
Now, there are a few exceptions that we found through some tests
where you could make your green screen darker or maybe brighter.
Hair is always the hardest to key definitely blond here is a nightmare.
So the idea is to make a big contrast
between the blond hair and the green screen.
We can't change much about the colors but we can change the luminance value.
So I'm dropping the green to 30%, making it darker.
Against a brighter blonde hair, this actually worked out pretty good.
Tip number 3!
Again, your green screen should be green.
This time I'm opening up the vectorscope.
Many DSLRs like the GH5, or external monitors like the one from SmallHD
have these tools built-in.
If you don't have that, you could always film a short clip
and to look at the vectorscope in Premiere or something.
There’s also an app called Green Screener which gives you a ton of different tools
to help set up a green screen.
I haven't used it myself yet but it has some good reviews.
You want to make sure that the highlight on your vectorscope
leans towards the green.
If it's not the case, then check your white balance.
If it's not set according to the type of lights that you're using,
you will capture a different mix of green.
You can also change the tint value if necessary.
Just be careful that you don't overdo this,
as you still want your subject to look natural.
And if you keep having trouble getting the highlight into green,
then you might need to look for a different green screen.
But that's why I would always suggest you purchase a green screen
that is specifically meant for video,
don’t just buy a fabric at a carpet store or something.
The next tip is gonna be post related,
but I want to show you exactly how easy the keying will go
once you got the shooting right.
We did several tests using the Ultra Key effect from Premiere Pro,
then we tried out two paid plugins, one was $300 and the other one $500,
which I've requested a refund from, because
I was getting the best results with Key Light from After Effects.
This is a built-in effect, so everyone has it.
If you search for the key light effect, you will actually find a preset for it.
Applying this to your clip will also add a key cleaner and a spill suppression to it.
I always thought that it didn't really matter where you clicked with the color picker.
But apparently it is pretty important.
This is a tip that I got from Jason Levine who also worked at Adobe.
What you want to do is locate your composition and layer window.
Drag them so that they lay next to each other.
Then change the view in your layer window to Anchor Point Path.
And then change the view in your Key Light effect to ‘Status’.
When your now hold down your Alt key while moving the color picker around
you can see in real time what the key light effect is selecting.
And even by moving one pixel you can see how different each selection is.
You want to try to get as much black to cover the green
and then you click.
And this will give you a very solid key.
You can then fine tune a bit more using the clip black and white,
but I would suggest to stay off the Shrink and Softness settings.
These are settings that you should only use when the keying doesn't work so well,
because in the end it will only mess up your edge,
so it's best to stay off from that.
Finally, we have the key cleaner,
which is gonna add a transparent stroke over the edge
and this one works great with blond hair.
And finally is the Spill Suppressor which is gonna remove any unwanted green.
We didn't even have to touch those,
but you can dial into the details if you like so.
And here we did again the exact same thing on the shot with Yannick
wearing the green suit and waving his blond hair.
Now it's definitely not perfect, we're still kind of learning ourselves,
but considering this is a very hard key to pull, I think that we did a pretty good job.
And that brings me to the last tip.
Whenever you're gonna work with tracking marks on your green screen
I see many bigger productions use something like red.
I still really haven't figured out why that color in particular is gonna be more helpful,
probably because of the contrast, which will make the tracking go easier,
but you can't really key it out, since red comes back in the skin tones.
So we did the test, we used green tape that has a different tint of green
than the backdrop.
We added a few dots and did a camera movement.
Then in After Effects I simply clicked on the 3D Camera Tracker and it worked!
This allowed me to link my new background to one of the points.
And there we have it, Yannick enjoying his vacation
in his green suit and blonde hair.
So that was it again for today, I learned a ton of new things
and I really hope that you did too.
Thank you so much for watching, thank you Storyblocks Video for the support.
And as always:
Stay Creative!
We tried out 2 paid plug-ins, one was 300 ducks…
300 Ducks!
When you want to say buck and dollar at the same time, you get duck.
-Jordy, we can’t pay our bills with ducks!
It has to stop Jordy!