Need advice on editing video with green screen spill.

[Todd Terry]

This is much more of an editing/compositing question, and really doesn’t have much to do with cinematography (since the footage is already in the can), so if you don’t get an answer here you might ask in one of the editing forums or one for the particular editing platform you are using.

Keying in a situation where you have green spill can be super tricky, and you’ll be a little bit at the mercy of the sophistication of whatever keying software you are using.

KeyLight in After Effects would be a good place to start, it’s definitely one of the better key options that’s readily available.

One option is to do some really extreme color correction your footage… playing with brightness, contrast, saturation… until you are able to get a key with clean edges (even if the footage looks terrible itself, but keys cleanly). In that case you can use that key to generate a black and white key mask that you can then use as track matte key with your normally-color graded footage. You might still have to do a fair bit of garbage matting and maybe even some rotoscoping… but it can work.

If that can’t get you where you need to be, you’ll likely have to move up the food chain a bit to something like Ultimatte or other very high-end solutions. In that case it’d be likely best to farm your composite work out to a post house that can handle it.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Jack Vogel]

Thanks a bunch Todd. I did a bit of research on generating a black and white key mask (a term and technique I had not been taught in two semesters of digital cinematography *eye-roll*) and I found a very clear tutorial that deals with my exact problem in dealing with an over-lit green screen (also wrinkly and made of 3 different shades of green cloth, LOL).

https://youtu.be/woZflhiwJ6Y

It’s moments like these that make me more and more sure that my professor should focus on his day job of making videos rather than teaching because his method seems to be “go find a tutorial”.

Thanks again. I think this B&W masking will be a big help.

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[John Fishback]

Keylight and other keyers usually have Spill Suppression parameters that can reduce green spill. Also, you can add multiple instances of the keyer and restrict their area of coverage. That way you can address trouble spots more effectively.

John

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[Philippe Gosselin]

What a killer tutorial. Thanks, great find!