Okay, so the first thing you want to do, before you do anything else, I must tell you that this does involve a third party plug in. the plug in is called K-Lite. Now, you could download K-Lite and thefoundry.co.uk. The exact link to the downloads page of K-Lite will be in the video description.
Now, remember if you are using Adobe CS3, remember to download the latest version of it that is meant for Adobe CS3. If you are using Adobe Aftereffects setting, then remember to download the latest version of that, that’s meant for Adobe After Effects 7. And if you are using less than seven then, I don’t know, go find another tutorial.
Okay, so after you have downloaded the plug in from thefoundry.co.uk, import your video to your computer and the open up Adobe Aftereffects then import it to the project window. Next thing you want to do is, drag in your video to the timeline.
Okay, so next, what you want to do is create a mask. So to do that, click on the pen tool, make sure the layer of the video is selected and make a mask around what you want to show. So right now, I want to show me and this chair. By the way if any of you were wondering what that tray there, that sitting there for no reason is for—well, I really don’t know what it’s for. I just put it there. Hopefully one day Megan Fox will be there. I don’t know, but yeah, for now it’s empty.
Okay, so after you created that mask, what you want to do is go ahead and use that plug in, go to effect with the layer selected go to effects, keying and then click on K-Lite. Once you click on K-Lite, you go to the screen color. So the screen color, click on this little pen drop lift thingy and you want to choose green, obviously the green screen. If you are using a blue screen, you want to choose blue. So now you want to choose something that’s close to where you are. So I'm just going to choose right there. Okay. And once you choose that, it should disappear and there you have it. So now, everything disappeared in the background. So everything looks black right now in the background. If we follow the transparency grid, then you see what’s going on. You see that in the background there is nothing. But I'm just going to—well, yeah, I'm going to leave it like that because that way I got to see what’s going on.
Okay, so right now, I did this on purpose, I made the video really crappie on purpose, so I could tell you guys to not do this. So I'm going to start giving you guys tips on how to make it look good. Well, I'm not sure if you guys could see it or not, but it’s really, really pixelated right now. So in order to stay away from that, here is some tips:
Tip number one; use a good camera, right now, I really don’t have a good camera, I'm just using my digital camera at the moment. So yeah, it’s really not a good camera for recording this kind of stuff. Second of all, keep the place really light, if you want it to be lighted, first of all for the movie or whatever you are making to look good and set up also the green screens lighted.
Okay, next, you want to make sure that the green screen is not wrinkled so it doesn’t cause any shadows. So if you have shadows, that’s a big problem. Next, if you are going to use some shinny metal stuff or anything and just kind of attract light, for example if it’s going to extract the color from the green screen, so let’s say I have black or a piece of metal in my hand that’s going to attract the green color of the green screen, you want to stay away from that because that’s really difficult to get rid off.
Okay, so right now, it looks really pixelated, so what you want to do to fix that is first of all change the view in K-Lite, change the view to screen matte. That’s screen M-A-T-T-E. So once you click that, everything should go to either black, white, or gray. Now, what you want to do is get rid of this stupid annoying gray color. So to do that—let’s see, hold up a second. Okay, so in order to get away from that green color, you want to click right here and open up this little—I don’t know what’s it called, this little thing that clck on screen M-A-T-T-E, matte, matte, whatever you want to call it. Just click out that little triangle thing and some more option should open up. You want to click on the triangle thing, clip black and the triangle thing for clip white. From now on you guys are going to refer to that thing as the triangle thing because—well, that’s what I'm referring it to.
Okay, so after you have done that, you want to basically bring out the black and the white and get rid of all the gray. So in order to do that, I'm just going to start raising this white little by little. And you don’t want to do it too much because then you can get this ugly pixelated edges which I'm going to show you guys how to fix. Okay, so the white looks good, so now let’s go to the black., increase the white a little more. Okay, so that looks pretty good for now.
Okay, so what you want to do after you have done that, you want to—well, you’re going to get those ugly razor riser, whatever you want to call the ugly pixelized whatever edges. So, in order to fix that, you want to go to screen pre-blur and put the number up. So let’s say—I don’t know, maybe 2, 2.5. Yeah, 2.5 looks pretty good.
Okay, so after you’re satisfied with the way this looks, you want to change it back to your final result. Once it’s back to final result, then you will see—let’s get started on putting the background on. Okay, so I see it’s back to final result and it’s looking way better than before. I don’t know if you guys could see it because I don’t know if the quality is that good, with Camtasia studies but I could sure see it from my point of view.
Okay, so next, go to the project window and I'm going to drag down the Tech Support Gone Bad logo, and you want to drag it obviously under the video clip. And once you have done that, you’ll see whatever you just played, you can put video, I'm just going to put the Tech Support Gone Bad logo, resize it and you will see it in the background. And that’s pretty much it, just go through your video, go through your video, make sure everything is looking all good, make sure nothing is cut off because of the mask we put, and yeah, make sure it looks good.
And so, once you are done with that, you want to render it, and since this is my first aftereffects tutorial, I'm going to teach you guys how to render it, but in my other tutorials I'm not going to be doing that. So you want to watch this video. If you want to watch this tutorial, if you want to know how to render it.
Okay, so once you set aside with the way it looks, click on composition and then click on add to render queue or control shift and the little slash, whatever you call it, the thing with the question mark, just for the shortcut key. So, click add to render queue. So, let’s make this bigger so we can see what’s going on.
Okay, so the rendering details. You want to click on right here—first of all you want the render settings to be best settings, you want the log to be errors only, you want to output to whatever the name is .AVI and then right here where it says output module, click on lossless or whatever it says right there, change, click on this little arrow thing and change it to lossless. Once you have changed it to lossless, click on it. Once you click on it, this little window will pop up, you want to make sure everything you want is the way you want it, all the settings and stuff, and if you want the sound to be there, the audio to be there, I’ll just click right here where it says audio output.
So let’s say you recorded something with you talking. If you don’t click on that audio output, it’s not going to think, it’s not going to talk, your mouth will moving and you’ll just like an idiot because there will be no sound coming out. So you want to click audio output and if you want to mess around with the settings, but I would just leave it and just click audio output to make the sound go and click okay, and then click render, wait for it to load, wait for it to render and then it’s going to render the thing to your desktop and then from there you could just change it or put it to wherever you wanted.
So that’s it, my tutorial on green screen. Hope you guys learned something today, be creative with this, have fun with it, I know I am, and goodbye.
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