During today's lesson along with learning the history of compositing we also took our footage from our green screen lesson a couple of weeks ago so that we could take these two subjects and place them in the shot of looking out over the balcony. This was a really exciting lesson, even though it was difficult to get your head around. There were A LOT of different steps and I made sure that I documented all of them so that I knew how to do it in future for my module. We started off by imported all our footage in, which included the back plate and the green screen footage.
We created a new composition with our green screen layer and toggled the background so that it was transparent and then used the pen tool to mask around out the rest of the background so that we were just left with the small area of green screen and the subjects.
We used the technique of key framing so that the subjects were inside the mask throughout the whole footage, this can be a very tedious job but we only had 10frames of footage to work with so it didn't take long at all and I didn't even need to move mine at all.
We then added an effect onto this layer which was called Keylight 1.2, which is a powerful piece of technology which allowed us to select the green and be able to blend it out so that everywhere is transparent. We then used the eyedropper tool to be able to select the green and then this made it transparent as well, but at this stage there were still a few shadows around the edges which we would have to changed.
The way in which we fixed this was by changing the view to screen matte at the top and then balancing the white and black so that the shadows around the edge disappeared. We then also added a screen softness around the edge so that the edges of the subjects became feathered and finished this stage off by adjusting the screen shrink/growth so that we got rid of that small black edge around the subjects.
We then right clicked on the green screen layer and pre-composed this, at the same time changing the name to KeyFootage and ensured that we checked the box that said to move all of the attributed over as well so that we could keep the effects that we had added on. We then added the back plate into the new composition and we could begin to finalise our effects and make it look like the subjects where actually there.
With the KeyFootage layer selected we then added curves in the colour correction effects menu so that we could alter the colours in the subjects to make it look they they are they are not lit under studio lights. Once the menu appears we can change the RGB palette to the individual colours so that each one can be altered separately making it easier to get the correct colour. At this time we also changed the exposure so that we could make the scene darker and then added a tint to create that look like they are actually there and to bring out the black and white in the scene.
We then duplicated the KeyFootage layer twice and deleted the effects off just these two, leaving the first layer the same with the effects still on, so that we could create light. We made only the top layer visible and then toggled the transparency back on so that the background was black again and inverted the channel. We then changed this to an alpha channel and clicked on the toggle switches/mode button at the bottom so that we could change the track matte of the second layer, underneath the one I am using, to Alpha Matter "KeyFootage".
So that when we went on the second layer, this was all we could see, a small amount of light appearing at the top and sides of the layer.
We then added a channel blur, under the effects menu, to the first KeyFootage layer, so that the light was more clear, and adjusted the alpha in the top menu before we pre-composed the top two layers together renaming it SpillAlpha.
We then duplicated the back plate and put one of them above KeyFootage so that we had the edge of the subjects in view. We then changed the track matte on the back plate to Alpha Matte "SpillAlpha" and then changed then going back to the spill layer we then changed the opacity so that it was more subtle.
We then had the shadows to add in under the subjects so that we could create the illusion that they were actually there, we did this by duplicating the KeyFootage layer, getting rid of the effects and changing the exposure right down so that the subjects where just black. We then opened the transform menu underneath the layer, unlink the chain on scale and changed the Y axis to -100 so that it was upside down and moved into position under the subjects. We rotated this slightly so that it looked right and applied a fast blur to the layer before moving it below the KeyFootage layer and renaming it Shadow.
We then started the final stages of compositing this footage by first selecting all of the layers and pre-composed them altogether, calling this Grade. We then added a new adjustment layer, just by right clicking in the composition space in the bottom left, and added a colour correction curve effect onto it, again by changing the individual RGB settings, before sharpening the footage.
Lastly we then created a solid shape in which we made sure it was black and we then applied a mask onto it and made sure that it was an ellipse. We then inverted this shape by checking the box, applied a fast blur onto it and changed the opacity so that it didn't look as heavy and we were ready to render it out.
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