Green screen help

[mububban]

Hi gang

I've got HD footage shot in a studio of my boss, basic talking head info stuff. Green screen background, he's in a black suit with light blue shirt and red tie.

I want to key out the green for white so I can fade in our company logo as well as put text in and out. The default colour removal turns the background to black. How can I change this?

Also, when I use the Green Screen keying filter in PE7, his shirt changes colour. I've attached a comparison screenshot. Is there any way to get around this?

Thanks!

[Chuck Engels]

Hi, good question and a very timely as this seems to be a pretty hot topic lately.

First of all I can tell that the background is not very evenly lit. That is a major problem with trying to key out a color, but not that it can't be overcome.

Keying a color will turn that color transparent. Putting another clip, logo, color matte, or other video footage, on a track below will show through the black parts. Just remember, it isn't really black, it's transparent

Personally I like the Chroma Key effect. You can pick the color, set the blend, threshold, cutoff and smoothing. This helps to make a cleaner effect. The Green Screen Key only lets you adjust the Threshold, cutoff and smoothing.

The shirt has turned grey because the threshold is too high and the lighting is not very good.
Lighting is the most important part of keying, evenly lit background and no shadows if possible anywhere.

Try the Chroma Key Effect, use the dropper and pick a midrange green color from the background. Then use the threshold, blend and cutoff making adjustments until the green is gone and the shirt is still white.

It take practice and a little testing to get things just right. There are a few other topics about green screens including some sample footage, check them out.

[Paul LS]

You can also use the Garbage Matte to eliminate the majority of the background... for example to get rid of the creases and the line to the right.

[roadsideron]

Yes, use the general Chromakey effect and when you left click on the picker, also hold the shift key down and as you drag the picker around on the green portion of the screen you can see where the initial picker will remove the most green color. Also, you'll have to adjust the sliders to get the maximum effect without affecting your non mask area. You could also try using the non red keying effect and see how that works. I use the Chromakey effect to get a basic key, then sometimes I apply the non red key to remove any green fringing left by the chromakey around the edges. I now use two four foot shop lights hung vertically alongside my greenscreen to get a bright, evenly lit greenscreen. I use 5000K t2 bulbs and have no problems keying out the greenscreen.

If this is HD try the similarity at around 30 and make sure the slider below it is not greater than the similarity number. Try just under what ever you set the similarity too.

[mububban]

Thanks guys, I've had a bit of a play with the sliders (which I never would have found on my own!) and am making progress. I'm tinkering with the footage whilst doing mor epressing tasks, hence the slow response.

Latest question - I'd like to remove the green, and replace it with white. Our company logo has black text, usually put on a white background. I'd like to fade this in and out to allow text bullet points to come in at relevant points. But when I drag a white coloured background jpeg with our logo on it, and it asks me to videomerge, I get the attached image. The black text kind of looks hollow and nasty.

Can I choose to insert the magical floating boss on top of the white background so the logo remains intact?

[Bob]

But when I drag a white coloured background jpeg with our logo on it, and it asks me to videomerge, I get the attached image. The black text kind of looks hollow and nasty. Can I choose to insert the magical floating boss on top of the white background so the logo remains intact?

Certainly! When it asks you if you want to apply videomerge, just say "NO". The white background will not be removed. If necessary, you can place a white solid layer at the very bottom of the layer stack and place the boss and logo clips on layers above that. You can stretch out the duration of the white solid layer to match the length of the video.

[mububban]

Well duh Silly me was thinking that Video1 would be the primary track, and any other things like the backgrounds should get placed on Video2. I couldn't figure out hy it wasn't working.
After reading your post I switched the tracks around, and voila, it's now doing what I had envisioned. Thanks again for helping overcome the forces of noobishness

[Chuck Engels]

Think of the tracks as a stack of images, you see the top one but not those underneath.
If you make the top image semi transparent you can see the one below it, or if you were to move it off of the stack slightly the one below would be visible.

If you had clips on 30 tracks then; Track 1 is the very bottom of the stack, track 30 would be the top of the stack

To make the images below track 30 visible you need to either, resize the images and make them smaller, make the images transparent or semi transparent, or move them off of center or position them so the images below can be seen. All of these changes can be made using the clip properties.