Hey guys, whenever we think about keying, we think of green keying
and that's because it gives us the best results and there are various of great tools out there
that help us pull a green key.
But what if you don't have the green screen?
Do you have a green screen?
And how does it usually work out for you?
Let me know in the comments.
Or you know, during post-production you suddenly decide to key out your subject
that doesn't have a green screen in the back.
Well, luckily there are different ways to do that.
Unfortunately they won't give you similar results,
but for many kinds of effects they are very useful.
For the first one, the only thing that you're gonna have to do is film your subjects from a tripod.
You want to take an empty shot and one shot with your subject.
In After Effects we can find the effect called difference matte.
Apply that to the subject clip
and from within the effect settings make sure to point the difference layer to the empty shot.
Basically, we're keying out everything that is the same between the two clips.
But because one of your clips has a person standing in the shot,
which is not the same, it will retain that.
You've got some controls to fine-tune the keying, but that's pretty much it.
The result will of course not be the same as for a green key,
but for quick effects like this, it's definitely useful.
The next one is called luma key, which we've all heard about from those travel videos.
What you want to do is film your subject against a dark background.
Make sure that you're wearing bright clothes.
Then apply the luma key to this clip and make sure that you select the key out darker.
Use the threshold to remove the black.
Finally you're able to refine the edges.
If you're still left with an edge, apply the simple choker
and increase that until the result looks good.
And now you can add elements behind the subject.
All right, the next one is rotoscoping,
something that I don't use very often because it usually doesn't give such a good result.
You need to make sure that you have a clear difference between your subject and the background.
Mostly structure in the background doesn't go so well.
An easy fix for that is to shoot with a wide open aperture,
a shallow depth of field having the backgrounds blurry.
In After Effects, double-click on your clip and then select the rotor brush from the toolbar.
Draw and make a green selection of everything that you want to keep.
You might want to create multiple selection strokes.
Hold down alt to bring up the red brush to tell After Effects what not to select,
and once you have your selection in place
just hit play and it will automatically track the movement of your subject.
Now, keep an eye out where the mask fails,
if that happens pause and adjust the selection.
Then press play again until you have everything tracked.
Now, when you're done go back to the composition window
and you'll see that the effects roto-brush has been applied to the clip.
You can further tweak the settings in here to deal better with the edge and the hair of the subject.
Two more keying techniques to go,
but first you'll need a beautiful background for behind your keyed out subject.
Well, simply head over to Storyblocks Video to find one.
There are thousands of different backgrounds in 4k quality that you can choose from,
but also other stock clips in various categories and collections.
Now, we have been using Storyblocks now for years and it's helped us on many projects.
For instance, whenever we need a quick effect or title design
we simply download one of their After Effects templates
and we have a great result in seconds.
And the great thing is that you can download unlimited video assets from this growing library
with an active subscription.
So, go check it out.
Click the first link in the description down below for more information.
And now continue with keying technique number four.
Some curves and a tracking matte.
For this you want to film against a bright background,
or a black background could also work, like we've seen before.
But it's a different technique again.
Start off by making a duplication of your shot.
On this duplicate add the curves effect.
With that you want to create an enormous contrast,
basically making areas pure white or pure black.
Then take the assets that you wanna place between the background and your subject.
From the column trackmatte select luma matte,
or the inverted matte if you have been working with a black background.
It will disable the output of the hard contrast clip and only use that as a matte for the keying.
Now, we also used the same technique in a recent video where we had Gilles walk
and underneath him we had these 3d elements.
Luckily, he was wearing white shoes, which made such keying possible.
And this brings us to the last keying technique.
We've got a shot of some trees with some blue sky,
but also lots of moving clouds behind it.
Which comes from Storyblocks because we didn't had any clouds, which is good.
Anyways, we can't just do a blue key if you want to key out those trees.
Let's add the effect called extract to it.
By default the luminance channel is selected,
on which we can already pull the brightness back to key it out.
This will work pretty well on the clouds, but not always on the sky.
So change this channel to blue.
And now you can see in the histogram that we have a spike,
which is the sky.
So pull back the slider until you're keying looks better now.
Finally increase the white softness to fine-tune the edge.
And that's it.
Add your favorite text or element behind it and enjoy the result.
And that's it for today.
Thank you so much for watching, thank you Storyblocks for the support.
And as always...
Stay creative!
Green screen five keying techniques without using a green screen.
Hey guys, whenever we talk...