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Skills Expanded

Keying Greenscreens in Composite

by Chris Glick

In this series of lessons, we'll learn how to key green or bluescreen footage in Composite. Software required: Composite 2011 and up.

What you'll learn

In this series of lessons, we'll learn how to key green or bluescreen footage in Composite. Using greenscreens is a common practice in today's VFX workflow, so understanding how to get a good alpha from greenscreen footage is very important. We'll begin this project by learning what a chroma key is and what we need to look out for while we shoot the greenscreen footage. From there, we begin keying a sample shot using the Keyer supertool. We'll then learn how to refine our matte and edge using the various built-in modifiers. Then we'll combine multiple Keyers to get the best possible result. Finally, we will composite our keyed footage over a background and learn about spill suppression and some compositing tricks to integrate our pieces of footage. We'll end by learning a method of treating compressed or chroma subsampled footage to pull better keys. Software required: Composite 2011 and up.

About the author

Along with creating and recording training, he also used to manage the support team and work closely with the production development team at Digital-Tutors, now a Pluralsight company. He began his career working freelance and quickly realized that he wanted to find a company where he could use his talents to help people succeed in the CG industry. Chris has likely watched more Pluralsight creative training than anyone on the planet, and its evidenced by his Einstein-sized brain and encyclopedic... more

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