20 ULTIMATE Green Screen Tricks You Need To Know

This right here is a bad green key, but I can fix that. Better. Now, as filmmakers we often use green screens to create certain visual effects and place ourselves in other worlds. But the question now is how to perform a perfect green key. Well, to start know which color you should use. Either green or blue. Both colors are perfect for a chroma key as they lay the furthest away from our skin tone. But each color has their own advantage. Green is better for bright scenes, while on the other hand, blue is better for darker scenes and blonde hair. This is all because of the luminance property of both colors. Another effect trend tip is the clothes your talent is wearing. Most of the time people are wearing more blue colors than green, so green screen is the most obvious choice. By the way, wearing black doesn't make the green key easier. Oftentimes we get green spill on our black clothing. Also, don't wear anything shiny or hanging loose like a belt. You will hate yourself in post-production. Tip number three, let's set up the green screen. Very important when doing so is that you don't have any wrinkles, because it will make the key much more difficult. You can iron or steam your green screen, making it super smooth. By the way, set it up as tight as possible. The next step, we're gonna hang our green screen a little bit slanted towards the ground. And why, you ask? Well, it will help to reduce the spill on your talent to a minimum and will also help to spread the light better over the green screen. Bring us to tip number five, lighting our green screen. We will always use separate zones to light our screen. Meaning we'll be using separate lights for our green screen and for our subject, giving us the most control over both. This will also make sure that one zone doesn't spill into the other zone and vice versa. If needed, you can use ceiling foil or a flag to help with that. Tip number six, lighting on your subject. Always try to light them in function of the background you'll be using. So, if there's a strong orange backlight in your background shot, try to recreate it on your subject. Otherwise, it simply won't match. They don't match. Super obvious, if you want to place yourself in an outdoor scene, well, go shoot outside with your green screen. This will save you a lot of time. Just match the angle of the sun and the amount of overcast with your background shot because you can't really match a sunny day with a cloudy day. Trick number seven, use the zebras or the waveform function on your camera or if you have them, the gyroscope or a light meter. With one of these tools, we can make sure that our screen is two stops of light darker than the subject. This will create a great contrast between the two, again making the key a lot easier. The zebras or the gyro function will also help us for tip number eight, avoiding hot spots at all time. These areas of light will create a big difference in the tints of green. So, while using the functions, you can place your light in such a manner that the screen has a super smooth lighting. Of course, using soft lights will also help. This brings us to trick nine, motion blur. If your talent is moving a lot, this will create motion blur, which isn't the easiest to key out. So, increase the shutter speed, which will decrease the motion blur. And don't worry, you can always add it back in, in post-production. For example, with the pixel motion blur effect. Talking about motion, for the next trick we're going to track our camera movement. For that, we're going to use tracking markers on our green screen. But you can't just place them anywhere, so you need to be smart about it. First of all, go for contrasting colors, like red or black. Place them on the green screen wall and on the floor. However, we noticed that After Effects will have a hard time tracking it. So, that's why we always add some extra objects to our scene, like a light stand or this red ball. This will give After Effects more data to work with and will result in a better tracking. Guys, like you can see, we love some good filmmaking tips and tricks. Now, if you have some you could share with us, leave them in the comments. Now, another tip, if you need some green screen shots and you don't have a green screen, well, Storyblocks, the sponsor of today's video, has your back. You can find dozens of cool green screen shots in their library. And what's really amazing is the game-changing plugin for Premiere Pro they just released. Here you can find their entire library sitting in a Premiere Pro window. One million royalty-free, high-quality stock assets, right there, one click away, while you edit. No more switching between a browser and a project or forgetting where you saved your clips. It speeds up your workflow immensely, letting you create more awesome stuff. Just like Jordy did with his big Faroe Island project. While doing the sound design, he would browse through the huge library of sounds from Storyblocks while staying inside Premiere Pro. And the best thing is that he could download unlimited assets to test what works and what not. A real time saver. Now, besides sound effects, you can use the filters to search for everything. Stock clips in HD to 4K resolution, Premiere Pro templates, overlays, lens flares, you name it, you find it. So take back creative control with Storyblocks' unlimited, royalty-free stock library and tools today. If you want to know more about Storyblocks or their awesome Premiere Pro plugin, check out the first link in the description below or go straight to storyblocks.com slash cinecom Now back to the green screen tips. What if you don't have a green screen but you do have some RGB lights? Well, you can use them to shine on a white cloth or a white wall and create a fake green screen. Of course, all the previous rules we just mentioned also apply for this technique. Bonus tip! You can use your RGB lights to shine on your green screen to make them even more greener. We are using these Emron T2C lights, which are awesome. Link in the description below if you want some more info. As you can see, I'm right now in the post-production studio because the next part is going to be all in After Effects. I'm ready to go. Tip 12, the one-click green key. If you have your green screen shot, you can use this technique to test how well your setup was. You do a simple chroma key and not tweak it. If it looks bad, I would recommend to go back to your setup and fine-tune it some more. Software can do much but not everything. But what if reshooting isn't an option? No worries, we do have some tricks up our sleeve. For the next tip, I will use the HSL secondary option from the Lumetri effect to remove contrast in the green screen and even make it more saturated. We're going to select the entire green color range and with the correction options we are going to reduce the contrast. Make it a little bit blurry and if you want you can add more saturation, making the green easier to keep. For trick 14, we will remove leftover spill on the subject with again the HSL secondary tool. We will select the green color spill and make it desaturated or more magenta, which removes it. However, you can also use the advanced spill suppressor native in After Effects or if you have Red Giant from Maxon, you can always use the primate keyer to do your chroma key. This effect has a lot of options such as spill suppression. Next tip, we are moving like a bullet train. Choo-choo, bitches. Sometimes you just have noise in your footage. That can make the keying more difficult. So let's remove that noise. Do your chroma key and then re-add some noise to match it with the rest of the scene. After Effects has a native noise remover but we like to use the one from Red Giant. Another trick that can help with getting the best key possible is zone keying, meaning I will mask and key every body part or object separately. With a rough mask, I single them out and key them. This will give you the option of doing detailed green keys for each part, giving you the most control. Of course, repeat this process until everything is completely keyed out. Tip number 17 and I know it's weird but use the green screen to rotoscope your subject. The green background will give a good contrast and will make your rotoscope go super smooth. If you want to know more about rotoscoping, I'll leave a link in the description below. We are getting there. Three more tips. Keying out a shadow can be a real pest. I f***ing hate it. So I remove it and bring it back later on with a solid layer and a mask. However, when doing so, pay attention to the original shadow and try to mimic it as good as possible. Or I also use the shadow effect from Red Giant which gives a super good result. For the next tip, avoid focus pooling in front of a green screen. The blurry subject will be difficult to key out. So best that you shoot with a closed aperture bringing everything in focus. I will then add the focus pool in post-production by using the camera lens blur. Now, last but not least, don't make it yourself difficult. Stop doing that. Think about every element in your shot. Something I forget way too much is hair. Jordy has this stubborn pluck of hair that always sticks out. This is hard to key out properly but easily fixed. We can simply use some hair gel to flatten out the pluck of hair. And there you have it, everything you need to know about green keying. Now, if you want to know more green keying tips but without a green screen, check the video on my left. Thank you Storyblocks for the support, thank you guys for watching and, as always, stay creative!