Keying and Tracking in After Effects - Part 2

Music : [intro]
Joey Korenman : What's up Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day 21 of 30 days of after effects. Today's video is part two of the series where we are taking the Baltimore Orioles mascot, and we are inserting him seamlessly into my backyard. In this video, we're going to talk about keying, getting a good key and integrating that keyed footage into the background and making it sit in there with color correction and some other tricks. I want to thank the department of motion design at the Ringling college of art and design for getting permission from the Orioles, for me to use the oil's mascot footage and for shooting this on their red camera in the green screen room at Ringling, which is awesome. 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 this site.
Joey Korenman : Now let's hop into after effects and let's do this thing. So in part two, we are now going to finish this composite. And if you remember in the last video we patched our background plate and we removed the little pink chair that was sitting there. And we got a nice track on that chair so that we could actually translate that information onto another layer and now ready to grab our green screen clip and key it out and insert there. So here is the clip and it's, uh, I'm actually just going to make a new comp with it. Let's stick it down here and we'll call this keyed bird. Now, the way I approach keying, it sort of depends on what it is I'm keying, uh, and you know, the basics of king is that you want to break a key into a few different pieces.
Joey Korenman : So that way you can just sort of, you know, work on certain parts of the image with certain types of keys. And there's a lot of different strategies. I'm going to show you one that works pretty effectively in most situations. So this is the clip right here. All right. And it's always a good idea to just kind of scrub through it a few times and figure out if there's going to be any issues with it. I can see one issue is if I let it go too far, his feet actually break the frame. So I definitely want to make sure I don't use that part of the shot. So I'm just gonna put an out point here and then let's go to the beginning here. And at the beginning of the shot, if I use this part, the problem would be that there's a big shadow on the green screen here.
Joey Korenman : And it's a, it's a different color green now than the main part of the green screen. And so that would create a little bit of an issue. I mean, it's solvable, but it would just create more work. So I might as well save myself some work and not use any of the shot before this frame. So I'm going to hit B, I'm going to control click up here and say trim comp to work area. So now this is all the clip that I'm gonna, that I'm gonna use. So the first step that I do is to do what's called a garbage mat and a that's just a mask that's very, very rough. And it just cuts out, you know, all of this junk, like, you know, the lights and the stands that are in the shot. The obviously don't want, oh, this was shot on the red camera.
Joey Korenman : And then the footage was transferred down to a ProRes file. And you can see that the frame of the red actually is a little bit narrower than 16 by nine. So that's why you have these black bars at the top of the bottom. And I obviously don't want those either. So I'm just going to sort of scrub through and figure out, okay, so right about here is where I can cut off the frame and then on the left side, right about here. So I'm just going to draw a quick mask and I'm not going to be very particular about this because this is just step one and step two, we're actually going to make our mask much, much, much, much, much more accurate. All right. So let's finish this mask and then just scrub through and make sure that the, you know, the actor or the character or whatever your king doesn't leave the frame at all.