Insert a person into another clip

[Walter Soyka]

AE is both deep and broad, and it’s very hard to jump right in without taking a little time to learn fundamental concepts first. You’ve got to practice your scales and arpeggios before you can play Mozart, and you’ve got to walk before you can run.

Since you’re new to After Effects, I’d recommend the following link, in which Adobe’s Todd Kopriva pulls together some important introductory materials:
https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2010/01/getting-started-with-after-eff.html

I especially recommend the Video Copilot “Basic Training” series that Todd links to.

Finally, here’s a tutorial specifically on Keylight [link].

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Jay Gill]

Great, thanks! This info will be very helpful to get me familiar with AE. I have experience with green screen and keying in Final Cut so I was able to do this in AE, however, what I’m having trouble with is once I overlay the keyed person on the TV clip I’m using, I want to put the keyed person in the background and have the TV character walk in front of him. Is this done with the pen tool? Do you know of a good tutorial to show how this effect is done? Once again, your help is appreciated!

[Roger Arnold]

Hi. I have limited experience with AE, but I believe the principle (as with Photoshop) involves layers. One of the original clip (for the background) and a duplicate layer of the original for the foreground, with your green screen in the middle.

You may need to green out the foreground clip where your insert is going to show. You may be able to create a path that follows the motion. I don’t know if any of this is a real help. Just thought I’d share my two cents. Good editing. ✌️

[Greg Gesch]

Hi Jay. The two things you need to look up are: Rotoscoping (cutting out an image) and Compositing (putting something into a video and making it look as if it belongs). It usually does take three layers, bottom the whole video, middle the greenscreen, and the top layer is the whole video rotoscoped where anything that passes in front of your greenscreened character is.