Stick with 100% for this work, switching back to your normally scheduled resolution when all is through. Since you need to see the edge exactly as it is, any interpolation on-screen by FCP will contain artifacts that may not accurately describe your matte. Obviously, reducing the window size will not aid you, but going over 100% won’t either. For this sort of precision work, it’s imperative that you see the exact edge you are creating. Switch the window size from whatever you have it set to 100%, no more, no less. Pick up the Filters Tab from the Viewer window and drag it alongside the Video tab of the Viewer window so that you can monitor your changes to the clip as you make them. Now, double click your clip and bring it up in the Viewer. After keying out the green, whatever is on Video 1 will shine through where the green screen was. Why Video 2? Because this layer will need to be on top of your background footage. First, drag your chroma key footage into (and create) a Video 2 layer. So, how to get things clean before stacking the layers? Easy. You’ll find that the same battery will clean up almost any keys if you are consistent with 1) lighting, 2) framing and 3) organization. Rather a combination of filters is used in a particular order to begin the matte, produce a clean edge and kill stray pixels and finally eliminate any leftover color bleed. No one weapon will give you a good key in FCP (or Adobe After Effects either, for that matter). So how do you get FCP to narrow down what it mattes out to an even screen clean key? The answer is somewhat similar to the antiviral soup used to combat the AIDS virus. You will have tweak and tweak to get good results, but when you finally do come up with good results, you’ll spend less time tweaking the next time. Whatta drag!!! Welcome to the world of compositing. Unfortunately, if your lighting isn’t perfect (and it never will be), you will find that your initial key (simply selecting the key color in the filter window) removes not much of what you don’t want and probably takes away some of what you want to keep. Now, having shot some footage using this background color, we will use the keying filters in FCP to remove the color and reveal the layer underneath. In our preceding article, we chose either green or blue for our key color. Keying means choosing a color for a background that FCP will get rid of, leaving your three year old googling around in whatever the video layer underneath it contains. Then whatever you have on the video layer underneath shows through. FCP can look at each frame of video, find every pixel containing the color you have chosen for a background key color and make that pixel transparent. Think ahead.įor those just joining us, let’s review what keying is and how it does what it does. Wasted time re-doing work you’ve already done is depressing after the fifth time around. Also, set up an archive of Favorites in your filters folder and pull and tweak them instead of always starting from scratch. If you use the same lighting set for your footage, chances are that your keying settings will be the same. If you save the project file, recapturing and rendering is a snap and you can quickly find out if you were right. Sometimes after you finish a project, a better way of doing things comes to you out of the blue. If you finish a project, archive the project file when you trash your media. The only rule of thumb that pretty much applies to everyone is to stay organized. As you experiment, you will find the process and method that serves you best.You will also steal lots of great stuff from other compositors. One thing that must be understood with any compositing work is that there are always different ways of working. It is a skill that is improved upon with practice. As you enter this stage of the game, you should have some Chroma Key footage to work with. OK, so from Chroma Key Basics for DV Guerrillas Part 1, you have gotten up to shooting. “or ” Why is there a force field around my head?by Charles Roberts AKA Chawla
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