Microfilmmaker Magazine - Tips & Tricks - Creating a Greenscreen Period Piece: Driving in Classic Cars, Pg. 2 of 5


	Creating a Greenscreen Period Piece, Pg. 2

Step Two — Keying the green screen footage
In post, we looked at the various clips from the three cameras. At this time, I was unable to import the REDOne footage on my older Mac G5, although Paul Sulsky was able to bring it into Final Cut Pro easily on his Intel Mac. Once in FCP it becomes an Apple Pro Res file. We converted the Apple Pro Res file to DvcProHD and also to Animation Codec. Both of which I was able to get into After Effects on my Mac G5 with no problems. The animation codec files were the best, but they were also huge, several times the size of the DVCProHD files.

For the driving scene I used a clip from Blue Rock's Sony HVR-1 HDV camera which worked fine. I also got fairly good results from my Sony HDR HC5 consumer camera. Next time, I have to remember to turn off the sharpness setting, which gives the footage a bit of a halo.

I captured the Sony HVR-1 HDV footage directly from the tape into FCP and then brought it into After Effects. In AE you can drag the footage to the composition symbol at the bottom of the project page. (The funny icon between the file folder and the trash can.) This opens the footage in it's own composition.

Next I go to Effects>Keying>Keylight to open the keylight effect. Once open, I click on the eye dropper tool and then onto the green screen near the face. I change the pop up window from final result to Screen Matte. That's a pretty decent result. (The ugly white blob on the right is the REDOne Camera which was also shooting the same scene.) I take that out by making a mask using the pen tool (with roto bezier checked) and setting the mask popup to Subtract. I can also adjust the clip black and clip white tools under Screen Matte.

These are the main tools in Keylight and might be enough for some of your keys. To go further study the Keylight section in the manual or look for some Keylight tutorials (like those found at VideoCopilot.net, which are mostly free). It can get complicated, but seems to do a great job for the most part.