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Green Screen Help!!
Hi,
I am an editor / director working in Los Angeles . I currently use a G5 duel processor Mac for editing. I am looking for advice on the easiest, most economical way to take three hours of green screen footage which I shot on HDV 720/30fps. and create a one hour video with continually changing backgrounds, lighting and 3d transitions. I have captured everything in final cut and I have begun making very intricate lighting and color changes using multiple layers that have the color corrector applied. I was then planning on making a quicktime out of that and sending it into After Effects to remove the green screen and apply 3D motion effects. My problem stems from the fact that I have only begun the color corrections and the first minute of footage is estimated to take 16 hours to render. . Between the color corrections, lighting changes green-screen and 3d motion it seems near impossible to render such a long project efficiently within a month’s time. I am looking for any suggestions as far as work flow, production houses or post facilities that may be able to help facilitate the completion of this project. Is it possible to get a color corrected plate with the background keyed out and the alpha channel intact? Would that help me? Or would I still be in for weeks of rendering.
Any help would be appreciated.
thanks,
Dan -
5 Replies
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I’d do it all in After Effects. Otherwise you’re rendering everything out in Final Cut, then doing work in AE and rendering it out again. There are more (and better) keying options in AE. You can put your motion backgrounds on another layer and make sure all is keyed out when you turn that layer off/on. The simple choker and matte choker can really be your friend here, as well as Keylight for the keying.
Also, you will probably get better keys if you convert the footage to DVCPRO HD before you bring the footage into After Effects. Uncompressed HD would give you an even better key, but you’d need over a terabyte of free space for your 3 hours of footage, plus at least the same amount for your render files. That being the case, DVCPRO HD will do a pretty good job. Good luck.
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Use FCP to do the basic editing. Get all the elements in place, then move it over into After Effects with Automatic Duck.
Do all the final compositing and rendering in AE.
Keylight is very good. Another plugin that I use is Primatte. It solves some problems that Keylight has trouble dealing with.
AE — the professional bundle — also has the ability to take advantage of multiple machines to render a project. The result is usually a series of seperate frames which can then be read as a movie file by Quicktime. QT can also convert these discrete frames into a single video file.
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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I would do the green screen in AE or Shake and them I would export only the Alpha channel. Them I would do the rest in FC. The Alpha channel is just a 8 or 16b file so really light.
Rafael -
I second rafael. I usually export the key from AE then apply my effects in FCP. Also the rendering estimation is *never* correct initially. I’ve had renders that have said 5 days initially only take 20 minutes. That clock only seems accurate once it gets below 5 minutes or so.
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[editorla] “three hours of green screen footage”
I have to ask … are you really going to key the whole three hours of footage?
What’s the final product? A 90min feature with two green screen layers or a 10 min video with18 green screen layers…?Seems a hellava lot of material to key.
I’d be interested in what you’re making and the plan of your workflow.
cheers.
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