EDITING WORKSHOP Editing a Green Screen

Why Green Screen? There are times when you want to film somewhere that isn’t possible. Green screening allows you to experiment and make the impossible, more possible! It allows you to be more creative and make some very interesting visuals.

Don’t Be Lazy!! Even though we have these facilities to use – nothing is better than filming in an actual location!! Any green screen shoots need to be run past a teacher first.

Positioning Footage The most common mistake people make is having the green screen footage and background footage in the wrong place on the timeline. You must have your filmed green screen footage above the background footage in order for it to work.

Now if you play that back, you will notice you can only see the green screen footage and not the background.

Editing Green Screen Footage To add the background video, you need to add ultra key from the effects panel onto the green screen footage.

You still can’t see the background? You need to select the eyedropper option. Click this on the mid-tone green of your footage. You should now see the background! The colour chosen will show here

Tadaaaaa! You should now see a combination of them both!

Fine Tuning You can fine tune your green screen editing using the settings in the effects control panel. A good starting point if you still have some green around your footage is to change the setting to aggressive.

Fine Tuning Play with the numbers under Matte Generation until all the ‘noise’ is gone. Usually your green screen backdrop isn’t perfect. So shadows and highlights won’t be ‘keyed out’ until you make adjustments with the Matte Generation. Use the Matte Cleanup options to affect the edges of your objects. Choke will shrink the edges, while Soften will make the edges more fuzzy. Use Spill Suppression to adjust the edge colours of your subject. Sometimes when shooting in front a green screen, a green reflection will make your subject appear slightly tinted green. Spill Suppression can fix this problem.

Cropping Cropping can be your friend. Sometimes you don’t need to eliminate all of the background because you can just crop it out using the Crop effect. This way, you only have to focus on keying the area right around your subject. The rest of the frame can just be cropped out. Just make sure that your subject or any part of your subject never gets cropped out of frame. This is easiest if your subject isn’t moving around.