Keying and Tracking in After Effects - Part 1

Music : [intro music]
Joey Korenman : Well, hello there, Joey, here at School of Motion and welcome to day 20 of 30 days of after effects. Today's video is part one of a two part series where we're actually going to do something that's not very motion graphic. See, it's more compositing. Now, when I say compositing, what I'm really talking about is visual effects, which is something after effects is used for all the time. Now, the next two videos are going to cover a lot of important techniques that every MoGraph artist should know, because you never really know when you're going to need to pull them out of your bag of tricks. We're going to cover tracking, removing things from the background, keying color correction, a whole bunch of stuff. I want to give a quick thank you to the Baltimore Orioles who do spring training right here in Sarasota for letting me use the clip of their mascot and this tutorial.
Joey Korenman : And this was actually shot in the green screen studio at the Ringling college of art and design, which happens to be an awesome college that I used to teach at. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. All right. Let's hop into after effects and get started. So here's the final clip that we'll be producing. And, uh, like I said before, it's going to take two videos to do this. And I'm going to show you guys a lot of tricks, a lot of hopefully pretty cool techniques to do compositing with. Let me start by showing you the two raw clips that we're going to be working with. So here's the first clip. Now, this clip was shot in the green screen studio at Ringling.
Joey Korenman : This was actually for a class project that happened during the 2013, 2014 school year, and the Baltimore Orioles have their spring training in Sarasota. So a lot of times what'll happen is Ringling will bring in companies and organizations that have roots here and create class projects out of that. So this was one of those and it was pretty cool. Some players came down, the mascot came down, this was shot on Ringlings red camera, one of the red cameras and a shot in the green screen studio. So one thing I made sure to note before I went and shot the background was I made sure to figure out where the main light was coming from. The key light is that's the term. So I could match that when I shot a background. So if you notice here's the key light. So I made sure that when I shot this footage, I made sure the sun was over here, at least on this side of the screen, so that shadows would fall on that side.
Joey Korenman : And the brightest part of the bird would, would make sense. So that's really important. Now this is the raw shot. All right. And it's actually a much longer than the clip I showed you guys. I used to just sort of this little piece right here, looking at the grass, looking up and there's the bird there he is now. He'll notice my, uh, my four year olds, little Adirondack chairs. They're uh, this bright pink chair. Now, why did I do that? Well, I knew I wanted to track the bird to the ground and it would be pretty tricky to do that. If I didn't have some reference, something that I could track on the ground. Now I'm going to show you some different sort of tracking techniques with these videos. The grass is actually trackable, but really it's going to, it's going to be mainly trackable as like a large area.
Joey Korenman : Um, and we are going to do that, but if I want to actually position something right on the ground, I knew I wanted a reference object. So I thought this would be a good reference object because you cannot have any more contrast than between green grass and a pink Adirondack chair. All right. So this is what we started with, um, in, you know, beautiful sunny, Florida, just sort of outside my house. So here we go. Let's start by taking this clip and making a new comps. I'm just going to drag it down here and make a new comp with it. And the first thing I want to do is just trim this. So I only have the piece of the shot that we're going to use because I shot for like a minute. And I wasn't sure what piece of that I wanted to use.