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Welcome to a quick tutorial on the Green Screen. If you book the media classroom through Rhonda
Moore, you should be able to see that you've got some resources at your disposal that you
can use to record yourself in front of a Green Screen and then what I'm going to do right
now is show you how to knock that background out.
First things first, you walk into the media classroom, you'll see a bunch of chairs and
desks, and tables in place and you're going to need to move these out of the way. If you're
finding somebody at a desk, leave one desk and one or two chairs, and I'm going to show
you some details on how to set that up properly. Most important thing is you're going to want
to leave a good distance between the wall and your subject, may be 10 feet if you can.
The main reason is because you're going to want to have some distance so that light doesn't
reflect off the wall and onto your subject's hair or clothes, or the desk itself. It's
going to be really important to maximize that distance to minimize reflection.
Okay, so let's say you've captured some Green Screen footage. You have it now available
on your SD card. You can load it onto any one of the workstations in the Lyons New Media
Center in this tutorial work field. It is in Adobe creative suite 5.5. we'll be upgrading
soon, but the process will still be the same. Okay, so what I've done is gone up into my
finder and I've typed in Premiere Pro CS5.5, and I've opened it and then once you click
on it, it loads up the first thing you're going to get is this new project window. The
first thing you're going to need to do is you're going to need to specify where you
want to store it. What I have done it is I've created a folder on the desktop and I've called
it Demo. It's going to be important if you to render up quickly that you work on the
computer itself, but be share to copy your files off when you're done.
You have the file here on the desktop under your folder called Demo, and I'm going to
give it a title, going to call it Green Screen test. The first thing it's going to ask you
is what kind of sequence do you want to make. We're going to make a timeline, and it's going
to want to know what format the video we captured it is in. if you're not sure, it's going to
be probably one of two options if you have a modern camera that you've taken the footage
with. It will either be a 1080P or it will be 720P. The differences in between these
two formats is the frame size, so 1080P means 1920 pixels across by 1080 pixels down and
then this is 1280 by 720. Most of the time you can get away with working with 720P if
you're uploading the YouTube, but if you need to, you can work in 1080P.
First things first make sure you switch down these options here if you've captured using
the Lyons New Media Center camera. You can want to use the AVCHD option and you're going
to select 1080P, and you'll choose 1080P30. The 30 stands for the frames per second and
most of the time they capture at 30 frames per second.
Okay, let's give the sequence a name so we'll call it Test Green Screen. Welcome to Premiere
Pro. This is the first time you've used it. I'm sorry, it's actually less complicated
then it looks. First things first, we're going to break it down section by section and then
we're going through the Green Screening process. For starters, you've got this area where this
is your project window. This is where anything that needs to be worked on like footage you've
captured, visuals, titles, everything is managed and organized in this window. What I can do
is I can actually create new bins by right clicking and going to new bin and these are
just little arbitrary containers that we can use to keep track of things that we're making
or things that we need to keep organized. If you're working on a really big project,
you'll find that this really comes in handy.
What I'm going to do now is I'm going to import some footage that we captured in the past,
and we're going to remove the Green Screen footage from it. Let's start with going into
the finder, and so you're going to pull the footages, I recommend you pull the footage
off of your cards and put them in a folder on the drive, that way it's going to be a
lot faster to work with. I'm going to pull this footage in here and I'm just going to
select this clip I have and drag it into Premiere. It's going to make sense of that footage and
display it. I'm going to drag this into this video folder to keep it nice and organized.
As you're aware, maybe you've used Premiere Pro before, but the first thing you want to
do is you want to go through your source clips that you have ... that's a flattering photo
... here we go and you'd want to identify the section of the clip that you want to keep.
So let's start back here.
I take it from here.
I press the 'I' key to choose my endpoint and now I'm going to press 'O' once I'm ready
to get my O point. Great. I selected the point that I wanted to take from, from here all
the way to here, and you'll see I've got this grey box and I pressed the I key to select
my endpoint and the O key to select my O point. Once I've done that, now I can click and drag
this image down on to the timeline. There we go. Now I've got this window over here
lights up and this is the program window. Anything that's on my timeline that I want
to export into a final video is going to show up on my timeline down here and when I play
it back, you'll see that it shows up there on this window here. Okay. The source window
here, program window here which is tied to the timeline, and then this is the effects
window which we're going to get to in a second. Let me zoom in a little bit on this clip so
I can see it a little better.
What we've got here is actually a pretty decent little lighting on the Green Screen here.
You'll notice that the subject is entirely contained within the space which is exactly
what we need to have for a good Green Screen. First things first, I am going to try to just
see what kind of key I can take off of this. I'm going to go into this effects browser
over here on the left hand side and I'm going to type in the word ultra and this little
guy here is the plug in that we are going to use to knock out the green background.
Okay. I'm going to click and drag that onto the
clip and it first looks like nothing happens. That's because every time you want to work
with a particular clip, it has controls associated with it, controls for this plug in, controls
for the size, and you manage all those from this little window up here called effect controls.
Okay. Click on effect controls and you'll see there is Alter key which is added there
right there. These three options appear motion, opacity, and time remapping. Those are automatically
on every single clip. Let's start with Alter key. First things first,
we would need to select a key color that we wish to remove. Okay. I'm going to just grab
this little eyedropper over here, come on over to this side, and click on it. That's
actually a pretty good key. It's because it's fairly evenly lit for the most part. Now what
I'm going to do is I'm to go up to, I can't be a 100% certain if this is a very good key
and so the way to find out is to actually change the output from composite to alpha
channel. The reason for that is this actually just shows you what the computer can see and
what the computer isn't a 100% sure on. That's a really good key. You'll see down here in
the bottom corner is that it's a little bit shady so we're going to wrap up the range
of green that it can actually detect and that it will consider suitable for removal.
To do that I'm going to go into matte generation and I'm going to go to this little guy here
called pedestal and watch this area over here that's kind of sparkling a little bit. I'm
going to crank that up in until a solid black. If you have a key that looks like this where
you're background or the green screen area is solid black and your subject is solid white,
you have a perfect key. It's really, really nice.
Some of the most challenging people to do green screen on are blonde-haired people because
generally the light will bounce off the screen and hit their hair, which is why it's important
to put some distance between you and the green screen. I'm going to switch this from alpha
channel back to composite, and you'll see that we have got this gentleman here on the
background that is pure black. Well that's not quite the image that we want to have and
what's great about the green screen is that you can replace it with any footage you want
to have but we need to bring that into Premiere Pro as well.
If you just bear with me for 1 second, I'm going to grab an image and then we'll place
it in the background. Actually you know what ... yes. Okay, so I've grabbed an image that
I'm going to use in the background and you can use anything. You can use additional video
footage, a still image, whatever you want. I'm going to click and drag that into my bin
and what you want to do is you want to have the object that you'd like to have in the
background underneath your video.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this clip up here into video track 2, and
I'm going to grab this photo and drag that down underneath it. What you should see is
grumpy cat in the background directly on behind this person. Okay. I put that back. Okay.
Great. We've got a really nice key here. We've got a good separation on the background. If
you want to work on this image a little bit and change the way it looks, you'll notice
how important this really high quality large image.
If you wish to scale it, just click on the clip and for the actual picture, and you'll
see that we've got this effects controls up here for the photo. You go to motion and then
you can adjust the scale and you can actually make it smaller. You adjust the position.
You can move the position around and you can fill the screen a little bit more. The only
thing that's great is because we've got this person separated from the background, we can
actually move in the frame and make them smaller too.
What we can do is we click on the video channel here for this character here and what we can
do is we can do the same thing. We can adjust the size, and we can also adjust the scale
so I can make it more smaller, and we want to go over 100% and I can change his position.
This is the vertical second frame down here on the corner, and I can also move him left
or right this wall. I can have him down here in the corner like he's this cat's conscience
or something. Let's make that cat bigger. Oh! That's good. Okay. It's on our playback.
The length of the photo, you'll notice that it cut out went black here when I got to this
point. All you have to do is stretch this out if
you want it to be the same length as your clip. Okay. There you go. That's doing a simple
green screen where you take ... I'll do another example with a green screen footage that isn't
as great and I'll show you how to clean it up a bit more. Okay.
Now that you've got your clip done. Let's say I wanted to export this beautiful piece
of art into a video format once it's finished. The way to do that is you get your clip set
up here on your timeline and when you do an export. We go up to file, export, media, and
it's going to open up dialogue box that allows us to choose some details of both this video
that we are going to work with. First things first is it's going to ask us what format
do you want it in. For maximum compatibility with YouTube and Vimeo and just generally
to maintain a good encoding, you're going to want this one here called H.264. That's
an industry standard for video encoding.
Then next thing you want to do is you want to change the output name to a place where
it's going to live once it's all done. I'm just going to move this into the Demo folder
here and we are going to call it Test Green Screen so let's go and put it in that location
there. You'll see the size is going to be full HD. It's going to be 1920 by 1080, 29.97
frame 30 frames per second. It's going to do at 9 megabit per second which is decent
quality for uploading to YouTube, and these are the settings you're going to want to use.
You're going to want to make sure that your frame size is 1920 by 1080 if you started
with that size. You're going to want make sure that your frame rate matches so 29.97
is good. Pixel aspect ratio you can set to 16.9. Down here, this is the bit rate setting.
This is the quality the amount of data that would be sent per second so in megabits per
second. Generally, 9 is a good number for uploading to YouTube. You still have some
different options between VBR and CBR. If you want to really quick encode just use CBR
and set it to 9. Okay. Down at the very bottom, you'll see you have the option to use maximum
render quality and frame blending. You can turn that on if you like. Estimated file size
will tell you how big you think your file is going to be.
Now if I just click export what's going to happen is it's going to put a window here
that says exporting with a little progress bar, and I won't be able to do anything else
in the program which is kind of disappointing. We'll see we've a bunch of green screen clips
that you need to output with different backgrounds. We're going to want to set them all up in
a queue and then export them all at once. The way you do that as you click on queue
once you've all the settings that you've got, and we'll say saving and now we're going to
export it into that format that we just described we wanted to have and it's going to do through
this program called the Adobe Media Encoder which is nothing more than just a window that
has the names of the files that you wish to output with all the settings.
If I made another clip for example or another sequence and I clicked export and I clicked
queue, it would just put it below this one. When you're ready, you click the play button,
and it will go through the process rendering every single frame and it will pull into that
file that you've opened and made. This is only like a 10-second clip, your export will
take much longer especially depending on how long it is. That's satisfying.
Now that's done, I'm going to click on ... this done button here ... that just shows me a
log file of how it went, I don't want that. I'm going to right click on this output file
and I want to go reveal source file. That's also in the same folder as my, that's not
what I want. it's right here. I exported into the same folders as a source. Here is Test
Green Screen. If I open that up, it should be a nice full screen 1080P video with this
guy here and grumpy cat in the background. Great. Okay. That's done.
Here's our video. There's our output and that's how you do green screening.