Premiere Pro: Green screen

 Today we filmed an interview video in front of a green screen, to learn the proper protocalls/setup for filming and how to edit a green screen video.

We first set up the green screen, lights, camera and sound. The lights were important since a green screen needs to be evenly lit. We had ~5 lights set up, including two big ones behind the camera (with diffusion paper on them to diffuse the light {Which looked a bit like tracing paper} as well as blue gels? which made the lights look less warm) and smaller ones nearer the green screen with diffusion circles? {looked like hoola hoops with material over them} and umbrellas?. The big lights got warm so it was important to think about health and safety when dealing with them, this is why the diffusion paper is heat and fire resistant.

Once we had set up we did a practice take to learn what to say at the start of the filming, this went along the lines of "Standby, quiet on set, camera rolling? (rolling), audio rolling? (rolling), ... (scene _ take _), (clapper board), action." This made it so we could sync the audio and video up much easier. After this, we each took turns operating the different equiptment, directing, interviewing and being interviewed. Once we were done, we had lots of green screen content and a better understanding of what it would be like on a proper film set.

While the audio and video files were transferring, we practiced editing a green screen example of some people clapping. After opening premiere pro and setting creating a sequence from the greenscreen footage, we added a crop effect to get rid of the unnecessary background elements. To do this we made a mask within the crop, by using the pen icon (next to the ellipse nad rectangle masks) then drawing around the people (remembering to connect the start and end of the line) and changing the crop settings so that the mask was inverted, mask opacity = 100 feather= 20 and one of the crop settings (top bottom right left) was 100. 

After doing this we could then key out the green using the ultra key effect and selecting the green colour. We could then edit the settings like matte generation/ clean up. There is also an option to view the alpha channel, which gives an idea of which areas are removed. 

For this task we also had another go at syncing audio (like in the chance encounter 2 task), we could do this manually (and then create sequences for each scene) or use the merge feature ( select the things you want to merge, select merge then click audio, use audio timecode from clip and remove audio from AV clip) This would create a seperate clip with merged in the name. 

Once we had created a basic draft by syncing up all the audio and then arranging it, we then created a new sequence with AVCHD 1080p25 settings and then added the draft sequence (which was called selects) We could then easily add a background behind the draft, which would be visable when the greenscreen is removed. 

Next we started removing the greenscreen, in a similar way to the practice task but instead we used an opacity mask to remove the unnecessary parts. The most challenging part of this task was masking around hair, this was because it picked up the green colour a bit and made the video flickery. I tried my best to fix this but it is nowhere near perfect. This would be something I would like to improve. Another challenge was glasses, to fix this problem I had watched a video which explained that you can add a inverted mask to the ultra key effect which allowed you to set an area which would not be green screened out (this needed to be keyframed a bit if the person moves their head). 

I also watched a video which gave the tip of using the HSL Secondary settings (In colours) to make the greenscreen more green, this helped to speed up the process considerably. The steps to do this included: selecting the green colour, expanding the H a little, expanding and adjusting S and L, using colour/grey to see which areas were selected, making denoise and blur = ~1, editing the correction so that tint, contrast and sharpness were as low as possible and that saturation was as high as possible & finally clicking the three circles above the colour wheel and setting them all to green and increasing shadows, decreasing highlights and adjusting midtones accordingly. This made the greens of the greenscreen more concise and more green so they were easier to edit. 

I chose the background I used because some of the people talked about travelling so I thought it was fitting, however I could have probably edited the colours so that they fit the background better.

(Warning: video contains swear words)