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Premiere-After FX edit Green Screen conundrum
Hey,
Long-time reader, first-time poster.
I edit a web series and am trying to speed up my Premiere-After Effects workflow. Here’s the channel so you can see what it’s like easier than I can explain: youtube.com/GreatestMovieMoments
Each 4/5 minute episode is a bunch of interview soundbites from usually four characters, all filmed in front of a green screen.
It’s unscripted, so first I spend a lot of time cutting down and shuffling around the interviews in Premiere.
Once I have the edit locked, I send all of the interviewees to After Effects to place each in their own unique scene (e.g. bedroom, office).
To do this, in Premiere I colour-code each interviewee, select all the clips of one person (on it’s own video track perhaps), and send to AE.
In AE I remove the gaps, nest into a comp, on which I mask and keylight out the green (I have a lo-fi green screen setup, so find that the extra power, versus the ‘Ultra Key’ in Premiere, useful), add all the elements and effects (using z-space with a wiggle on the camera to make it a bit dynamic). They’re lo-fi, silly effects but I need to use After Effects rather than stay in Premiere.
I then render, take back into Premiere and place into a position on top of the right clip, using blade with snap to chop it up.
Here’s the issue – since the interviews are all so chopped up, and each person is within their own scene, I’m finding this last part a bit painstaking – fiddly and time-consuming – especially with four people. It’s currently a zero-profit project so I’m desperate to speed up the turnaround, and kinda begrudge this final AE stage more than i’d wish.
I’ve attached a pic of an example timeline.
I hope that makes sense – if not I’m happy to clarify. I guess I would like to peace of mind that I’m at least not doing it really inefficiently, but if someone could tell me a faster way, I’d be eternally grateful.
Thanks, Kieran
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1 Reply
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A thought: If your greenscreen background is consistent, how about exporting all of the people footage as a single video, keylighting them to a transparent background in one go and exporting back as a single video with transparency. Then you would bring that back in and just chop in the right backgrounds based on your color coding.
As for camera shake in premiere, there’s this: https://premierepro.net/deadpool-handheld-camera-presets/
You may be able to use that to add camera shake right in Premiere. The question is, will it be synced between layers. If not, you can always render the composite (people with backgrounds), reimport it and add the camera shake to that single video track.Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer
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