Video Tutorial: Compositing in After Effects

Getting the Project Files

Download the project files

After the download has finished, be sure to unzip the file if it hasn’t been done for you.

Link to project files.

Project Overview

Using and Adjusting Footage

1. Drag and drop the video file from the Project Window into the Timeline.
2. With the video layer selected, hit S on the keyboard to open up Scale. 
3. Enter 35% for Scale.
4. Click on the Pen tool in the top toolbar.
5. Use the Pen tool to draw around the main figure, creating a garbage mask This removes the unnecessary edges of the footage.

Keylight Settings

1. In Effects and Presets, type in Keylight. Select Keylight + Key Cleaner + Advanced Spill Suppressor. 
2. Drag and drop this effect onto the video layer.
3. In Effect Controls, click the eyedropper next to Screen Colour. Select a bright green from the footage.
4. Change View to Screen Matte.
5. Toggle open Screen Matte. Change Clip Black to 30 and Clip White to 65.
6. If not active already, turn on Key Cleaner and Advanced Spill Suppressor.

4 Color Gradient

1. With the video layer selected, hit Ctrl-D (PC) / Cmnd-D (Mac) to duplicate the layer.
2. Hit Enter (PC) / Return (Mac) to rename it “Color Overlay”.
3. In Effects and Presets, type in 4-Color Gradient. Drag and drop it onto the Color Overlay layer.
4. In the Effects Controls panel, click the eyedropper next to Color 1 and choose a hue from the Composition Window, preferably a cool color.
5. Repeat this for the next three colors.
6. If not visible, activate the Layer Modes panel by hitting Toggle Switches/Modes in the lower left of the layer stack.
7. Change the Layer Mode of Color Overlay to Hard Light.

Add in Precomp

1. If not applied already, drag and drop the Text and Frame Precomp from the Project Window panel. Organize it in the layer stack so it’s below the footage layers.
2. Select both video layers and drag them to the right, so they don’t interfere with the text.

Additional Resources for Chroma Keying

The Foundry - Keylight Help Page

Adobe Help - Keying in AE

Tutorial Keylight - Jason Levine

Silo Tips - Using Keylight

Video Transcript

Hello, this is Tziporah Zions from Noble Desktop, and in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to do compositing in Adobe after effects. We're going to be working with a piece of green screen footage here, click to see it over here. Let's load it up to this, and we're going to be using the key light effect. Key light is actually not made by Adobe. It's made by a British software company named the Foundry. I think now nowadays you could find it by Framestore, if I'm not mistaken, Adobe licenses it from them so that they can bundle up with after effects at no additional cost. So that's great. That comes free with the software, essentially. So basically, we're going to be isolating and cleaning up this footage over here and they are going to be adding some effects to it, so it blends

visually with the rest of the layers we have going on here. What we're doing, in this tutorial is called Chroma Keying, you could see like, you see this green background up here, up here, sorry. And it's usually done with either a green or blue screen behind your subject. Well, any solid color would work for your screen. Most commonly, you're going to see green or blue because those are the colors that are furthest from human skin tones. So let's preview the animation. So you can see how I scrub through the timeline and see how the woman stands out here from a background image, and she's got a couple of color effects applied to her. So you can contrast this with the original footage over here, which is just her. On like, just on a green screen. We're actually going to be removing that green color with the Keylight effect.

So chroma keying is like useful for combining moving green screen footage with like other background elements and with the keylight effect, we can quickly isolate pieces of footage. So that allows us to apply all kinds of effects and animations for isolated footage and background objects. So the main task is we're going to be using is just a single piece of footage here, and it's like precomp text included as well within the file. You can find these projects with those assets included in the video description below. So the first thing that we're going to be doing is dragging and dropping the footage of the woman right into our composition window. I'm going to hit S for scale on my keyboard. I'm going to shrink this down, shrink this down.

Touches right around 35% on working with different kinds of footage, it's pretty common to have them like all sorts of sizes, so you know you're going to want to just adjust them to fit whatever you're working on. You know, I'm going to actually put this up 32%. I like that a little better. I'm actually going to shift her down a little bit. So the bottom of the figures, like flush with the bottom of the composition window. All right, perfect. So the green screen, you know, the elephant in the room, we want to get rid of that thing.

So we're going to head into effects over here. We're going to type in Keylight and there's one, in particular, we're looking for. So you see, this one's got a long name. It's called Keylight plus key cleaner plus Spill suppressor. And it's got a long name. But don't be intimidated. Drag and drop it over here. You're not going to see a difference at first. And basically, what this is, it's the basic Keylight effect, with some added effects attached to it that make it easier to clean up a green screen video. So like I said, nothing changes visibly. But after we tweak some settings, it's going to look totally different. So we're going to be changing., so I'm going to be actually going through a couple of these terms so you understand what they mean.

You can use them in your own project. But basically, the first thing we're going to be doing is head over to screen color and we're going to grab that eyedrop tool. And what this is basically the screen color you're telling the program, what color do you want to make transparent? And we're going to be picking the green color over here. And you could choose a wider variety of colors. If you have a Mac, you hold down command as you move around your eyedropper. I'm a PC, so I'm holding Alt for a wider variety of colors.

I'm going to get the brightest green I can over here. You see that disappears from around her. It can see a bit of a green haze around here, but for the most part that green screen is gone. You could see it in the corners. But we're going to be doing some stuff to get rid of that. So the second thing I'm going to be doing is actually going to be making what's called the garbage mask. I'm going to grab the pen tool over here and I'm going to just draw kind of like a white pointy shape around her. The reason being I'm doing this to cut out extra bits of the footage that I don't need, so if I don't need it, why would I want to bother keying it? You know? So that's that. So I'm going to click my selection tool, so I don't actually draw anything else from the pencil. All right. And then over here, where it says View? So intermediate result is showing us with the green haze around her, but also like the with the, you know, the screen color removed. I want to move this over to screen matte. What this does, you see is black and white, look at our footage. What this does is that it reduces our, you know, our footage into grayscale and wherever the black is, that's what's being removed, wherever the white is, that's the footage that we're keeping. But you can see within our footage, that there's like some shades of gray, and I actually don't want that. We want to get our footage as high contrast as possible to really successfully make it very clean.

Since Kaylighting depends a lot upon the contrast from the figure from the background, we're going to want to be able to differentiate, like, tell the difference where the edges of our figure are so clean them up better, make them sharper. Stand out more. All right. So let's head over to key cleaner. It's actually turned on already, so basically reduced chatter refers to as the footage moves along, there might be a couple of speckles in and out, in and out of green, black, you know, colors that we don't want. And if I put that on, that would get rid of that. The footage that we have actually should be all right. So we don't need that. And then we can also turn on an advanced spill suppressor. So that is also going to prevent, like any reflective green that has gone into our footage, like if she's holding something shiny. You know, any background color that got into our main footage, I should get rid of that so that now that that's the additional effects are looked at, we're going to head into the detailed effects. So, you know, there's quite a few over here.

You know, there are things like screen pre blur, which refers to like, do you want to blur your, you know, your figure itself, Screen mask, inside mask, outside mask, that refers to the masks within and outside the figure, you know, and there's a couple of other additional effects. I'll show you the ones that we're going to be working with. We're going to toggle that screen matte because that refers to the combined matte that we're working with. And so clip black, sorry, Clip Black and white. So clip Black and white refer to the individual. It's a bit like almost like the level setting in Photoshop if you work with that. And basically, what that means is that I can intensify the whites. I can intensify the blacks like, pull back the blacks. I could pull back the whites within my footage. So we're going to work with that. I actually want my clip black. We're going to put it around 30 points to see how that looks. OK, OK, not bad. It got rid of a lot of that.

That dark gray. All right, let's pull back the white. Perhaps how's that going to look? OK? I'm going to put it up to 65 and see how that works. You know, I'm going to experiment with my settings over here, and then I'm going to check what it looks like, you know what it looks like and is there anything else? And I want to do your screens softness, screen shrink and grow. Oh, and roll back first. If you like, mess too much with black and white, clip roll back kind of like softens both of them together, so it's not too aggressive. Screen softness just again, like softening the edges of your screen. This black and white, there are a bit like black and white. So what these guys do, like the despot black one, it moves like it's black if you have a white matte but it simplifies the mask so makes it kind of look blobby.

Here you could see yeah, I see. It's like making the matte more defined. For some things that work for our product. We're not actually going to be doing that. Despot white, it does the same thing. But for bits of white again, it simplifies the matte and makes it look a bit blobby. Not long for this, but you know it works for some projects. By the way, the despill bias and the alpha bias, I apologize, I skipped over them before, but what these guys do is that like if bits of your image become transparent because it accidentally, maybe it's, you know, the background color spill over into it.

It will, you know, depending on what color you pick, that should fix it up. You know, if you choose the color to kind of like, pull out of that. But again, our footage should be OK without it. So those are a couple of the terms, like I said, there are quite a few here, but I think getting a handle on like a couple of the basic ones is a good place to start. If you are new to keylight, the keylight effect. Now we're going to head up to view. And now that we seem to have gotten a clean map, let's put it down to the final results on view.

And there you go. So this is what our keylight looks. It looks pretty good, looks pretty good. I notice that my mask is cutting off a bit of her, so I'm actually going to stretch it down a bit. Thank you. All right, and let's play our clip to see if our keylight has worked well all the way through. All right. As you can see as a scroll through, my timeline looks pretty good. It's a pretty good key and it didn't take much work to get it done. So what we're going to do next is actually applying just one more additional effect. So let's get started. All right, we're going to duplicate our footage layer on my PC, I hit Ctrl D. On a Mac. You'd be hitting Cmnd D.

I'm going to hit enter on my PC, return on the Mac, to rename it. I'm going to name this color overlay. That should indicate, you know, what we're going to be doing next, and if you remember that blue green kind of hue we had in the beginning, that's what we're going to be applying here. I'm actually going to click the little box next to the name. I'm going to change to purple because I like having my layers all quickly visible by different colors in the layer stack. That's just a personal preference. And now we're going to head over to see effects and presets, and I'm going to put in four color gradient, it popped up just like that. Drag and drop on color overlay and whoa. You can already see where we're headed with this. So it comes with these preset colors, but I actually want colors pulled from the background, mostly so it blends in a little more.

And oh, I'm going to be doing is just grabbing these eye droppers and pulling from the backgrounds. Grabbing maybe another blue, nothing too crazy. Kind of avoiding the treens because those are quite saturated, then it would be too much so mostly heading with the Blues right now. I know they're pretty subtle, but. You know. And I didn't want to make it too overpowering, and I'm actually going to change the coordinates of some of these color gradient points because there's four of them. And these little four dots control where those gradients kind of end and begin. So I'm bringing them a little closer together. So this, you know, they're more apparent and there's a higher contrast than them. And now we're going to change the color mode. So if you don't have this interface visible with Layer Modes and stuff, you probably have this one.

So you just toggle switches and modes to go between the two and on color overlay. I'm going to choose hard light. So that will blend my current layer with the one below it in a way that the lower layer is still visible, but now has blue hue to it. And yeah, that's it for these effects. Last thing I'm going to be doing is I'm going to head over to project. I'm going to grab the precomp text and frame. Drop it below, you know, the other footage? And I'm also going to shift a little bit into the timeline wherever the words appear. Grab these two layers, shift them over a little bit to the side, so they're not on top of the words. That's it. All done. So with this technique, we can separate all sorts of footage out from green screens. And in fact, it doesn't actually have to be live footage like you can use any kind of high contrast footage like video stuff. So you can check out free assets and sites like Pexels.com. It's P-E-X-E-L-S.com and they provide everything from 3-D footage to live footage. You could stack effects onto isolated keylight layers, add effects below. Go for like a punchy graphic look with separate color effects.

Or you could like a head for something more natural looking with like a lot of stuff, multiply layers below, add light effects, and you can even keylight multiple objects out at once to duplicate footage layers. So that's all for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to composite in Adobe after effects, and this has been Tziporah Zions for Noble Desktop.