Today, we’ll take a look at replacing the sky
in your videos or still images.
This can be used to replace an overcast or a blown out sky in your videos,
or even add a bit of movement,
and bring your boring still image to life.
First, let’s take a look at replacing an overcast sky in a video clip.
If you have a clip similar to mine,
with a darker foreground against a light overcast sky,
the easiest way to remove the sky
is by using the Luma Keyer.
Place the playhead over your clip,
select it,
and use the keyboard shortcut Command 5
to open the effects browser.
Scroll down to the Keying category,
grab the Luma Keyer effect,
and drag and drop it over your clip.
Next, head up to the video inspector,
and to help you see exactly what you’re adjusting,
select Matte view by clicking this middle icon under the Luma sliders.
With the Matte view selected,
everything that’s black in your viewer window will be transparent,
and everything white will be opaque.
Any greys in the middle will be semi transparent.
What we need to do,
is adjust our luma sliders so our sky is completely black,
and everything in the foreground is completely white.
Play around with the sliders, and get it as close as you can.
Once you’re happy with the key,
switch back to the composite view,
and fine tune the sliders to get rid of the white around the edges.
Next, we need a new sky to place in the background.
Whenever I need something for my project that I don’t currently have,
my first stop is always Envato Elements, who is today’s sponsor.
It’s an all in one subscription service
and is a must have for any filmmaker.
For one low monthly free,
you get unlimited access to over millions of digital assets,
including stock video,
still images,
royalty free music and sound effects,
video templates,
graphic templates and so much more.
And everything is covered by one simple license,
so as long as you have a subscription,
you never have to worry about copyright claims.
For this project, I’ll select still images and search for blue sky with white clouds.
Envato comes back with over 300000 results.
I’ll just select the one I want,
download it and import it into Final Cut Pro.
Grab your background image,
drag it down into your timeline,
place it under the video clip,
and ripple trim it to the same length as your clip.
If necessary, resize this image to fill the video frame.
Now, if we play this back, as you can see,
there’s a bit of movement in the video clip,
but the background doesn’t move at all.
To blend this in a little bit better,
we can use the built in Object Tracker
to track the movement of our video clip,
and match the background to move with it.
Select the top clip, and in the video inspector,
scroll all the way down to trackers.
Click the plus button,
select an area in your clip to track
and click the analyze button.
Once the track is finished,
go back to your background clip,
and select the transform tool.
Open the dropdown menu beside Tracker,
and select the track from the previous clip.
This applies all the tracking data from our video clip to the background,
to match any of the movements.
Here’s our clip before,
and after replacing the sky.
Let’s take a look at another example,
and this time, replace the sky in a still image with a timelapse
to bring this still image to life.
The first thing we need to do is remove the original sky.
Since there’s no movement in our still image,
we could just use a mask,
but to make things a little easier,
we’ll use a combination of a mask and the luma keyer.
First, make a copy of your clip with Command C,
and layer it right above the original
by using the keyboard shortcut Option V.
Select the top clip, and press V to disable it for now.
Grab the luma keyer, and apply it to your bottom clip.
Isolate the sky as best as you can.
If we switch back to composite view,
as you can see, quite a bit of the building is keyed out.
Select your top clip, and press V to re enable it.
Grab the draw mask effect, and apply it to the top clip.
In the viewer window, make a rough outline
around the edges of the buildings.
By combining the Luma Keyer with a draw mask,
we have an almost perfect key on our sky.
Next, I’ll grab a timelapse clip I downloaded from Envato Elements,
and add it under our clips.
To add a bit of movement to the foreground,
you can keyframe the scale of the top two clip.
First, select both clips and combine them into a compound clip
with the keyboard shortcut Option G.
Next, with the playhead at the start,
use the transform tool to resize and reposition your clip.
Add a keyframe to all the transform parameters.
Move your playhead to the end of the clip,
and bring the image back to it’s original position.
Here’s our original image,
and our finished result.
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Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you back here next week.