Keylight Green Screen - Noise on Talent

We have some footage of a gent standing in front of a green screen, which was lit by a pro.
I used Keylight in AE to superimpose the man over some stock footage.
The edges don't look bad, but the man is wearing a dark suit, which has a lot of noise in it. How can I minimize this? (Reshooting is not an option.)
Since I am a novice, I am including a screen shot, which includes my Keylight settings.
The below still doesn't look completely horrible, but during playback, the noise is obvious and distracting.

One way to solve this is by first creating an interior mask...
1.) Draw a mask that surrounds the character with just the edges left showing. Then animate the mask path to follow the character for the duration of the shot. The mask doesn't have to be perfect it just has to stay within the edges of the character.
2.) Then duplicate the mask to create an exterior mask...
a.) Copy and paste the first layer with the animated mask on it so it's above the original layer.
b.) Change the bottom mask so it's inverted.
c.) Then apply the Keylight effect to the bottom layer so it's only effecting the information between the edge and the green screen.
d.) Then change the Keylight effect settings until you have a good key.
e.) The exterior edge may turn a slightly different color than the interior character so you may have to play with the mask expansion and feather settings on both layers in order to blend the exterior edge with the interior.
Finally, a blur effect could be added to the exterior keyed layer to soften any noise around the edges

Similar Messages

Noisy blacks in keylighted green screen footage

A friend of mine hired me to do some effects for a pepsi commercial (Video Production 4th quarter final project). He gave me green screen footage of dancers, and he wanted me to key the green out, put them on a black background, and make light streaks coming from their hands. I can do all of this, but I'm having trouble getting it to look perfect. He shot on a dvx100, 24p, and I'm certain he shot at a pretty slow shutterspeed, because I'm losing half of his arm when it moves quickly. I don't think this is fixable (if it is, let me know), but it shouldn't be too distracting. My main concern is I've got a lot of noise in blacks and dark colors, mostly the male dancers jeans. I have to set the screen matte clip black to about 50 to get rid of some noise around the dancer. Is there any way to reduce the noise within the pants/dark colors?
Heres a test shot I just exported:
http://vimeo.com/1721038
Any additional advice or tips on all the effects in this project would definitely be appreciated. Thanks!

thanks for the tip about the noise, I'll try it.
As for the light streaks, your right it does look a little too 2 dimensional. I used Kramer's tutorial to create the light streaks and parent them to a null object, i made the streaks a 3d layer, but I can't figure out how to make the streaks move in 3D space with the dancer's hand being a 2D layer. The only thing I could think of is pushing in with a camera, but I would need to sillouette the dancer to prevent visible pixelation right? Or is there a way where I can move the light streaks in 3D space without sillouetting the dancer?
Thanks ahead of time!

Green Screen - need to bring back a small portion of clothing

I shot some video against a green screen and the talent wore a green shirt under a black jacket. It is only a small portion of what she was wearing and the shirt never touches the green screen. Is there a way to only ultra key contiguous green or a way to bring her shirt back in after it is keyed out. It is only about a 30 second video and not a lot of movement.
thank you

It sounds like you did it the right way. Or, rather, the easiest, most common way.
It is possible to take the video, mess with the levels until you get all black or white, and use that as a mask. If you reduce the mask a bit you can avoid messing up any edges.
The advantage of that is that you don't have to keyframe. But that only works with some video. If there are soft edges like hair it won't work very well. But for clothing it is usually OK. Sometimes the movement is so radical that creating a mask out of the video itself can be a real time saver.

Green Screen Keylight 1.2 issues

Hello. My first time messing around with Keylight 1.2 for Green Screen effects.
I have been messing around with it the past couple of days. I've wanted tutorials.
I even have a couple light sources for my video... but it seems no matter
what tutorial I do or even just messing with the settings. I can't seem to get it perfect.
What is circled in red is what I keep getting. If I fix that.. then I get other issues such as.
I've messed around with, Screen gain, Screen balance, Clip Black, Clip White,
Now I can kinda fix it, but run into another problem, once I do.

Hi,
What you have here, is the real worl dof colour keying!
It is very rare that you will have source footage that can be easily keyed in one or two clicks. There are many, many reasons why the footage can be so hard to key - ranging from lighting issues, to footage source type etc. What you would need to do now, is do multiple keyeing techniques and passes to get the best possible matte. There really is many different ways to go forward now, and it is going to be up to you, and your time available what you will choose.
The easiest would be (off the top of my head) to duplicate the layer, mask out different areas, (lets say his right elbow for one layer, and his left arm for the other) and key each piece seperately, with its own "Best" settings. sorry, keep a copy of the the orignal as the background layer, and key it out as well. Then by setting the layers inthe right order and feathering here and there, you should be able to build up a very good matte.
As I said, this is only one possible way, you might then want to use your built matte as a track-matte. You might like to try and use Aharon Rabinowitz' techniques to get a nice tight matte to work on - http://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/junk_mattes.php
Search for more tutorials as well - if you have the time and money, get some books - http://www.betterworldbooks.com/green-screen-made-easy-id-EB2370003378283.aspx
or
http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/engeneering_technology/0470521074GreenScreen.htmlhttp://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/engeneering_technology/0470521074GreenScreen.html
Well, I hope that helps?
Pierre

Strange Results keying out Green Screen Using Keylight

Hi,
I'm keying out a green screen using keylight. When I look at the view "Status" in keylight I notice a strange result that I can't seem to resolve. Inside the solid area of the matte (the actor) his pants and shoes area are filled with tiny light green dots. They seem to be causing distortion on my final render.
No matter what adjustments I make to the matte I can't seem to get rid of these. I've attached a few small GIFs to show the issue.
Is there anyway to remove these dots so they are "solid" within the matte or a way to color correct them inside the solid area of the matte in the final result?
Any advise would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,

That's what the Despot options in the Screen Matte section are for. Alternative options include Minimax, Simple Chocker or third-party plug-ins like Re:Fill from RevisionFX. Also make good use of the various rollback options to control your Alpha levels.
Mylenium

Eliminating Noise on Green Screen Images

Are there any tricks (or plug-ins) to eliminate noise on images that are keyed into green screen scenes? I'm getting some noise on dark suit jackets.

I have the same problem with green screen, I usually just go to video settings and change the white point to something orange/yellow

Green Screen using AVC-Intra 100 ugly

Been using the hpx300 for approx two months mostly in 720p with great results. Just wraped our first true HD green screen shoot using avc-intra 100 at 24p with the intent of producing a white background mac-ad type, 5 min talking head corporate piece in SD. I had the camera mounted at 90 degrees to capture the 1920 pixels of subjects head-to-toe so I could then manipulate individual zoom and placement in post within a SD timeline. I've got two issues: one is that the images in post seem noisy, and any movement, as in subjects walking across screen, is a total mess - I say seem because all recording and playback on location looked just fine on a 1920x1200 monitor via blackmagic i/o box. I normally do basic editing in premiere with much help from AE for composting and color correction etc. Keylight has always worked great in the past. I must have something wrong with settings in the avc-intra HD content? Secondly, workflow is a bit convoluted... Keylight doesn’t apply in premiere, and AE doesnt do avc-intra. The workaround is to export avc-intra premiere timeline to AE and key that. In theory it should work just fine, but again my images are just noisy. Could this PR to AE workflow degrade image quality? Any suggestion greatly appreciated! Thanks, Matt

Poster must be busy shooting more stuff....
Found some info on that " hollywood camera " site.....
IS HD REALLY HD- GREENSCREEN ISSUES
These plates were all shot with an HVX-200, mostly with the 100 MBps DVCPROHD codec. This was good enough for us for Visual Effects For Directors because we had specific needs, but we don't consider them good enough for full film production.
Here's why:
COLOR SAMPLING: We      prefer all green screen to be 4:4:4, so every pixel has a unique color.      4:2:2 only updates the color every second pixel, but green screen      desperately depends on a sharp, accurate, scientific color transition.      With 4:2:2, you're operating in half resolution. But if you downsize, like      we downsized to 720x480, you're at full resolution again. So because we're      delivering in SD, the plates are 4:4:4 for us. They'll just be 4:2:2 for      you if you're delivering for an HD movie.
PIXEL ASPECT: When      a camera is listed as 1920x1080 HD, that's really stretching the truth.      You'll see that all our plates are in 1280x1080, which is the original      camera resolution, meaning that the plate has to be stretched 150% on the      X-axis to be in the right aspect. In other words, you're only operating at      66% resolution on the X-axis. Did someone say "smearing"?
NOT EVEN 4:2:2: By      the time 1280 has been stretched to 1920 to make up for the 1.5:1 pixel      aspect ratio, 4:2:2 has been stretched out too, basically becoming      4:1.5:1.5
LENS RESOLUTION: Nobody      besides DPs really thinks about the fact that a lens has a resolution.      Zoom lenses are made of many lens elements in a clever configuration, and      each element introduces some blur. That's why top-notch DPs like to use      prime-lenses cut from diamonds from King Solomon's mines, because if the      lens limits the resolution, it doesn't really matter how well you record      the signal after that. Some people have come to the conclusion that the      HVX-200 is really a 720p camera, because the 1080p resolution doesn't      really come through. We tend to agree, but we don't want to start a      religious war, and will say that it's just our personal experience. On top      of that, we've used a $500 wide-angle adapter on some shots, which really      butchers the pixel resolution, so even though we're recording at 1080p,      we're really not. But 1080p allowed us to record with the 100 MBps      DVCPROHD codec, which meant that we still got a very respectable resized      SD signal out of it.
BAYER PATTERN: Most      cameras use a Bayer pattern on the chip, so that every pixel is EITHER      Red, Green, or Blue — but not at the same time. A full Red-Green-Blue      pixel is derived mathematically by interpolation. It's no wonder that some      organisations are starting to call for an objective standard for what      really constitutes a pixel, because a Bayer pixel is definitely not a real      pixel — more like half a pixel. By the way, there are twice as many Green      pixels than Red or Blue in a Bayer sensor, so you're far better off using      green screen than blue screen on video.
HALO: Even      with the internal sharpness generator completely disabled, the HVX-200 has      a clear black fringe several pixels wide on the right side of actors on      green screen. Panasonic vehemently denies it, but it's very easy to see.      In this      picture, notice that white areas get a fringe, but darker areas, like      her legs or hair, don't. Panasonic's explanation has been that it's just a      shadow from the lighting (huh?), but the halo is on the KEY side — so the      only plausible explanation is a quantum singularity localized to the actor      which bends light as it passes by her body. We think it comes from the      Bayer pattern, but we're not sure. And Panasonic shouldn't feel bad. A Nikon      D80 does it too.
HEAVY COMPRESSION: Even      though it seems like a lot that we're recording at 100 MBps in the      DVCPROHD codec, if you calculate the bit-rate per true output-pixel, we're      actually still compressing at a whopping 15:1.
NOISE: Video      cameras in this price range tend to have rather high noise, and on top of      that, they're usually 8 bits per color channel. This can result in some      highly visible shadow noise that almost pixellates when the brightness is      just on the edge of a bit-threshold. You can see some of our plates doing      this.
An HVX-200 and all its brothers and sisters in its price range simply don't have the horsepower for full pixel, high dynamic range, high resolution, uncompressed production that you need to do truly professional green screen. Green screen is ultimately a scientific process, and is one of the most demanding things you can do with your camera. Regular live-action images are MUCH easier for your camera to handle, so for regular filmmaking, your camera is fine, don't feel bad.
We have nothing against the HVX-200 or its brothers or sisters — come on, we shot a whole DVD set about visual effects on it — but it's important to really understand what the limitations are. It's fine to own your own camera for regular filming. For green screen, you should consider renting the very best you can afford — and make every decision right, which is where we come in.
Thanks for reading!
Rod

AE CS4 - tips for getting green screen to sit nicely?

Hey, guys.
I'm about to start on a project that's largely green screen. Have a nice screen & lighting and the results are keying well. With that in mind, I'm working to improve on making the talent sit nicely in the backgrounds, which are typically stills of rooms or other physical locations. Here are the things that are on my radar at present, would appreciate any thoughts you might have on improving the results.
Make sure lighting of green screen shot matches that of set / background as closely as possible, e.g. light source direction, color temperature, etc.
Measure sets & use this information to properly scale talent when placing
Apply slight blur to background to emulate depth of field
Along the lines of 3), I find that a lot of green screen stuff I see doesn't really sell in part because there are very distinct and hard boundaries between the talent and the background. I'm also wondering if it's worth making a couple of passes at blur, one on the background, and the second by slightly enlarging the inverted mask from Keylight and applying a blur to that (a rather vague statement as I haven't experimented with this yet). The general idea to blur from the edges of the talent outwards just a bit, with a lighter blur, and blend that into that of the background.
On the surface, green screen stuff is supposed to be easy. Get a clean shot that keys well, drop it into your comp and you're done. However, seems to me that getting the clean footage to place is only the beginning in order to have something that truly looks natural.
What other tips and tricks do you guys use?

bogiesan wrote:
What you're asking about is the art of filmmaking.
Yep. Anything worth doing is worth doing to extremes!
While I'm not making a living with the visual arts at present, I've paid the bills as a musician, written a couple of books and these days work as a software developer. Whatever art I pursue, I want to achieve the highest production values possible.
And that's the cool thing about technology these days. Tools like Adobe are relatively inexpensive. Combined with a decent computer, you can absolutely create Hollywood quality material. It's not like the old days where a musician couldn't afford to buy that million dollar Neve console, let alone a recording studio. With the power that PCs give us, the limitations aren't physical or monetary. It's all down to talent and skill.
I don't have much of either of those at present, but that's a problem I can solve.

Painting a studio for green screen work

Hi. I use Adobe Master Suite CS6 (mostly with Keylight in After Effects for my green screen work), and I'm just about to finish building a home studio (20' x 13' x 9' high) - I know it would have been better to have a higher ceiling, but just couldn't swing it.
Anyway, I'm going to be filming a weekly show against a greenscreen on the far end, probably with Panasonic GH4 with gives access to 4:2:2 colorspace. For that (which is my main use), there will usually be 2 people seated at a desk roughly halfway along the length of the room - leaving 8 feet or so past them to the green screen which will be lit separately.
Occasionally I may want to video tape people walking around while talking. And may also tape live music from time to time. Ideally, both of those activities would incorporate a green-screen floor to allow for creative post-work.
I've had the studio sound proofed and will be building acoustic panels, and I'm trying to figure out my best options for
1) painting the walls
2) painting the ceiling
3) the floor is currently a smooth cement slab - not sure if I should leave it alone and just seal it; or if I should paint it green, at least in the back half of the room where talent would be filmed; or put some kind of covering down
I've heard different advice about painting everything black (because it won't reflect stray light, thus gives you good control - downside is all black could make for a dreary work environment
Have considered green on the whole back of the studio - walls, ceiling and floor - would leave green screen options from all angles, but could increase spill of green onto talent and make hard to fix in post
Or white ceilings - since only 9' high, I might need to bounce light off the ceiling while other studios would simply hang lights from above.
Also trying to figure out if I should just use cement slab, put carpet, or linoleum
Thanks for any advice.

The Rosco paint will cover anything in one coat, that' why it is expensive.
There are some very simple rules for lighting sets like the one you describe. Key the short side of the face, 45º angles, fill ratios. If you are new at lighting I'd look at some examples. They are all over the web. Here's something that you probably didn't think of. You don't need a lighting instrument to have a light source. You can use a reflector. With low ceilings I often stick reflectors on the ceiling and bounce lights off them. You can simulate any type of light by bouncing if you have the right kind of reflector. Smooth and shiny will act like a focused fresnel and matte (like a white show card) will simulate a soft box if you point a wide beam at it. In very cramped spaces, to get a pleasing overhead light with the right kind of fill I have often pointed a narrow beam light at a shiny reflector taped to the ceiling instead of trying to rig a light in the ceiling.
If you have room I'd probably light the set with soft boxes or diffused light first and then add just enough fill go fix dark spots in the green screen. Lighting the foreground first, especially in a small studio, will give you just about the right exposure on the back wall because of the inverse square law. There is a real strong temptation to put way too much light on the green screen. For best results the GS must have a lower luminance value than a caucasian face.
Also, remember that only the green screen behind your moving actors needs to be nicely lit. You can garbage matte everything else out and save yourself a ton of work in the studio. I just shot a pilot. There was no green screen involved but it was all on location in small rooms. For the most part I lit most scenes with 2 lights and 4 or 5 reflectors and 4 or 5 flags. If you know what you are doing it's very easy to light small spaces with a few instruments, flags and reflectors. For the setup you described maybe 2 lights on stands in front of the desk and 2 lights high in the back as backlights, a couple of big reflectors on each side of the set to smooth out the green screen and a few flags to control spill and I'd be done.

White screen or green screen question

hi
i have a series of interviews coming up...will shoot 1080. I like the nice clean look of white for the background. Question is whether to shoot with white backdrop or green screen and key white in post. Here is my issue: I want to use part of the space (framing screen right) for bullet points, graphics, etc. but i also would like to achieve this look at 2:40 into the video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRK5QVEE8Ng) Clearly, a green screen was used here. I am wondering if I shot against white could i just use the luma and key out my white background, create my effect with white and moving video then key it back in? Thanks.

Here's my 2 centimes, FWIW. luma and chroma keys both have plusses and minuses. Green screen will potentially give you the cleanest key if you follow a few "rules" while shooting. It's a huge challenge to do good green screen: large enough set so that you can light the screen absolutely differently than the talent. You're really lighting two sets-- the talent and the screen. you ought to be able to turn one off without affecting the other. You'll need enough distance to avoid bounceback onto the talent. or a magenta backlight to minimize the bounce. Fly-away hair is another issue-- paste it down. That said, a well shot greenscreen is a joy in post.
A luma key is quick and easy-- IF the subject cooperates and doesn't have any highlights that might get blown off. It's not good for people to have holes in their foreheads, etc.
I'd go green with a good shooter and proper lighting.

Is green screen possible with Mini DV?

Hi. I have a Canon XL2.
I want to use some green screen effects in my next doco to liven up some talking heads I am to record.
Is MiniDV even an option for this? I have heard the mini dv compression causes too many artifacts.
Please assume I have read all there is to read on the best practice for green screen and will have good lighting for the screen and the talent.
Thank you.

There are tricks to getting a better key with DV - what are you planning to use to do your keying?
Example - here's a matte generated from DV footage with my best effort:
and here's the same with a Digibeta SDI source:
both done in Shake.
Patrick

Using Green Screen tool after project roughcut complete

Hi peeps,
I know how to use the Green Screen tool in iMovie but my problem is I want to apply it to a project which I have already edited. So the usual process is drag your background into project then drag your clip from events on top... but I have already painfully edited my project and want to apply a background to it minus the green screens, can it be done at this stage?
cheers,
BB.

Also, try looking up the term "garbage matte." It's relatively simple concept that can be executed using many different tools and levels of sophistication.
Here's my workflow for standard greenscreen work, stuff that isn't too action-oriented, similar to conventional weather presentations:
1. Capture the footage in Final Cut Pro.
2. Seldct the takes.
3. IMport the best takes into After Effects.
4. Apply masking to the video to remove as much unnecessary stuff as possible using as few vertices in the mask as possible.
5. Apply Keylight.
6. Export to ProRes4444.
7. Import back into FCP.
Additional work might be required for wire or rig removal, rotoscoping for movement in front of or behind foreground objects, masking replacement layers to manage stupid costume errors like a green tie, light wrap, spill removal, reflection cancelation, shadow manipulation.

What's the best for green screen filter Color Key or Chroma key?

What is the difference, and what is the best choice for a person standing in front of a green screen.
Color Key or Choma key?
Which offers the most solutions for dealing with variations in the green background, such as occasional wrinkles/seams in the fabric.
Thanks
Rowby

I did mean Adobe Ultra or previously Serious Magic Ultra. I have no personal experience with Primatte, but have heard very positive reports. For relatively simple work with a good green/blue screen, which is properly lighted and not too much wrinkles, Ultra is easy, fast and effective, but it pays to have a look at the tutorials on how to setup a proper key. When you have rather bad lighting on the screen, Keylight is better and adds more flexibility, but is harder to master than Ultra. It also lacks the MSL (Master Set Libraries) capabilities of Ultra, but if you have never used Ultra before, you may be hard pressed to find any of the MSL's from the Serious Magic era around. Adobe has apparently stopped selling those, apart from the basic one which is included with Ultra. Maybe Karl Soule or Mark Mapes, previous Serious Magicians, can shed some light on the future of Ultra in the Adobe portfolio.

Green screen with AVC_Intra 100

Been using the hpx300 for approx two months mostly in 720p with great results. Just wraped our first true HD green screen shoot using avc-intra 100 at 24p with the intent of producing a white background mac-ad type, 5 min talking head corporate piece in SD. I had the camera mounted at 90 degrees to capture the 1920 pixels of subjects head-to-toe so I could then manipulate individual zoom and placement in post within a SD timeline. I've got two issues: one is that the images in post seem noisy, and any movement, as in subjects walking across screen, is a total mess - I say seem because all recording and playback on location looked just fine on a 1920x1200 monitor via blackmagic i/o box. I normally do basic editing in premiere with much help from AE for composting and color correction etc. Keylight has always worked great in the past. I must have something wrong with settings in the avc-intra HD content? Secondly, workflow is a bit convoluted... Keylight doesn’t apply in premiere, and AE doesnt do avc-intra. The workaround is to export avc-intra premiere timeline to AE and key that. In theory it should work just fine, but again my images are just noisy. Could this PR to AE workflow degrade image quality? Any suggestion greatly appreciated! Thanks, Matt

Sounds like the color space conversion is simply intensifying compression artifacts that are there in any case. It's a compressed format, after all. You might need to check some specific CoDec options to get a better conversion. Short of that I have no idea, since I don't have access to such files ATM, but if you can provide a short clip somewhere (rapidshare, yousendit etc., ca. 30-100 MB), I might have a look and be able to offer more specific guidance how to work around the issue.
Mylenium

RE: CS5 and CS5.5:Something on the green screen, can it be removed?

I didn't realise but while filming with a green screen there was something on it, can it be removed or is there a way I can "paint over it" to make it all green?

Does the talent interact with that spot, or is it always just background? If the latter, simply use a Crop or Garbage Matte to hide it.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

Keylight Green Screen - Noise on Talent

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