Green Screen Made Easy: Keying and Compositing Techniques for Indie Filmmakers Book

Acknowledgments x

Chapter 1 What is Chromakeying? Jeremy Hanke 1

Chapter 2 To Buy or to Build a Greenscreen Jeremy Hanke 7

Chapter 3 Popular Options for Purchasing a Greenscreen Jeremy Hanke 10

Rolled cloth backdrop and stand 10

Portable flexscreens 11

Cutting edge: Chromatte 12

Chapter 4 Building Your Own Greenscreen Jeremy Hanke 15

Creating greenscreens with rolled paper 15

Painted greenscreens using walls, flats, and foam core 16

Creating and hanging your own cloth backdrop 17

The portable vinyl greenscreen 18

Combining elements to create a cyclorama greenscreen studio 21

Chapter 5 Getting Your Background Environments Jeremy Hanke 24

Photography and videography 24

Digital matte paintings 25

3D rendering 26

Multilayered composites 26

Public domain 27

Internet and negotiation 27

Stock backgrounds 28

Chapter 6 Lighting Your Matte for Maximum Keying Simplicity Jeremy Hanke 29

Positioning your lights effectively 33

Types of lighting 35

Additional lighting elements to make your colors "pop" 37

Chapter 7 Lighting and Positioning Your Talent for Optimal Blending Jeremy Hanke 41

Preplanning the lighting to blend between foreground and background planes 41

Different types of lighting for your foreground 42

Placement of the actor and other blocking considerations 44

Tricks to popping your talent from the background 44

Chapter 8 Camera Techniques for Clean Keys Jeremy Hanke 46

Optimal distance and behavior of your camera 46

Setting up your camera for great keys 47

Creating High-Definition footage with a Standard-Definition camera 49

Chapter 9 Production Ideas for Creative Greenscreen Uses Jeremy Hanke 51

The invisible man51

Sin City makeup 52

Luma Keying 52

Shooting flame or smoke 52

Stop-motion animation 53

Chapter 10 Production Rules to Shoot By Jeremy Hanke 54

16 rules to shoot by 54

5 things to prep your talent with for optimal shoots 59

Chapter 11 Keying Essentials Michele Yamazaki 61

Great keying techniques vs. good storytelling 61

Chapter 12 Prepare Your Footage Michele Yamazaki 63

Check pixel aspect ratio/frame aspect ratio 64

Deinterlace your fields 65

Deinterlacing fields in After Effects 67

Third-party solutions for dealing with fields 68

Denoise and deartifact 69

Reducing noise per channel 70

The Remove Grain filter in After Effects 70

Better monitoring with a second comp viewer 72

Third-party solutions for reducing noise 72

Check your edges 73

Smoothing edges with Channel Combiner and Channel Blur in After Effects 73

Third-party solutions for smoothing jaggy edges 76

Even out your greenscreen 76

Third-party solutions for evening out your greenscreen 76

Save an animation pre-set of your pre-process effects 77

Garbage mattes (aka junk mattes) 78

Making garbage mattes in Adobe After Effects 78

Making garbage mattes in Apple Final Cut Pro 80

Third-party options for garbage matte creation in Apple Final Cut Pro 81

Making garbage mattes in Apple Motion 81

Chapter 13 Getting to Know the Keyers Michele Yamazaki 83

An overview of some keying plug-ins in Adobe After Effects 83

Your basic Color Key 83

Color Difference Keyer 84

Luma Key 86

Inner/Outer Keys 87

Chapter 14 An Overview of Some Third-Party Plug-ins: Keying Plug-ins for After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and Motion Michele Yamazaki 89

The Foundry Keylight 89

Red Giant Software Primatte Keyer Pro 92

Oak Street Software VKey2 96

Useful shortcuts for working with channels in Apple Motion 98

Digital Film Tools zMatte 99

Chapter 15 Mastering the Art of Keying Michele Yamazaki 102

Aharon Rabinowitz's Super Tight Junk Mattes 102

Multiple edge masks 104

The multiple edge mask technique in After Effects 106

Automatically cycle mask colors in After Effects 109

Color correction 109

Color correction in Apple Final Cut Pro 109

Third-party options for color correction 110

Chapter 16 Fixing Problems Michele Yamazaki 112

Hair and fur and other tough-to-key edges 112

Matte tools 112

Third-party matte tools 113

Removing tracking dots 114

Spill and despill 115

Spill suppression in After Effects 115

Third-party options for spill suppression 116

Keying motion-blurred footage 116

Third-party options for keying motion-blurred footage 117

Chapter 17 Making Your Composite Look Believable Michele Yamazaki 118

Matching grain 118

Matching grain in After Effects 118

Light wrap 118

Light angle 122

Depth of field 122

Reintroducing reflections 123

Creating shadows 125

Third-party solutions for projecting shadows 126

Adding motion blur back into the video 126

Chapter 18 Cool Tricks and Inspiration Michele Yamazaki

Dancing clothes, aka the invisible man 127

Red lips, gray face 127

Key smoke and fire? Not! or How to remove a black background from fire, explosions, smoke, window cracks, etc. 128

Replace television or computer screens 129

Chapter 19 The Sin City Conundrum: Blending 3D backgrounds with keyed footage Michele Yamazaki 130

Choosing a 3D software that meets your needs 130

Creating 3D backgrounds in 3D software 133

Rendering your backgrounds correctly 133

3D Channel Effects in After Effects 136

Depth matte effect: placing your greenscreen shot within your 3D 136

Depth of field with .rpf files 137

Matching your 3D and footage 138

Chapter 20 The Future of Low-Budget Keying 139

Conclusion 141

Resource List 143

Glossary 145

About the Authors 157