Advanced Green Screen Keying [After Effects Tutorial]

Green screening can be difficult and confusing. Despite your best efforts, you can still get crappy results. You still want to use a good, bright green screen or sheet, and you still want to evenly light it, but this method I've developed will give you consistent and effective results using only the built-in effects that come with After Effects.

Sometimes your screen might not be green enough, or maybe has wrinkles and shadows. Learn how to use the Selective Color effect to easily make your green screen greener and remove wrinkles and shadows.

Next, learn how to use the various settings in the Keylight effect to key out the screen (screen colour, gain, balance, screen matte's clip black, clip white, despot white, shrink/grow, softness).

Next, we'll extract the matte created by Keylight and tweak it using adjustment layers, the Threshold effect, lighten/darken blend modes, a bit of gaussian blur, and then apply that matte back to the original footage using Set Matte effect, thus preserving the original colors often distorted by harsh keying methods.

Finally, we'll remove the green fringe and spill by using a method developed by Andrew Kramer of Video Copilot (a much less aggressive key in Keylight, Channel Combiner).

Then all you'll need to do is color match, drop in your background, and you'll be good to go!

This was filmed using a Samsung HMX-H200 and a Canon EOS Rebel T3i (600D) DSLR, screen captures were done using CamStudio, audio using a Blue Icycle and Shure SM57 in Audacity, put together in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 (for the tutorial) and Adobe After Effects CS5 (for the green screening).

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