Learn how to get the perfect greenscreen key in Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro and Sony Vegas.


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This time on tips and tricks, we are going to look at some of the keen tools you can use to do a Chroma Key effect in three different software programs. [Music Playing] Tips & Tricks [Demo] In Adobe Premier, step 1 is clicking on the video effects tab open keying and drag the chrima key option on top of your video. [Demo] It is important to keep the video track that is being laid on top of the green screen, above the video track that has the green screen. From here we open effects, above the source window and click on the eyedropper tool. This tool picks up the color you want and uses it as the main plate key over. From here, we have a few options for adjustments to create the perfect chroma key. Similarity-broadens or reduces the range of the target color that will be made transparent. Blend is a double exposure option that blends the clip your keying out with the underlying clip. The higher the adjustment, the more the clips blend together. Threshold controls shadowing in the range of color that has been keyed out. The higher the adjustment, the more shadows are retained. Cutoff darkens or lightens the shadows. Smoothing specifies the amount of anti aliasing applied to the boundary between transparent and opaque regions. Basically, this creates softer edges by blending pixels together or sharper edges by disabling anti aliasing. The last step is to crop out anything we do not nee by clicking effects, then going to transform, which allows us to cutout the left and then, the right sides of the clip out. [Demo] When using Sony Vegas, first we have to go to video effects, click chroma keyer then green screen. [Demo] Again, we use the eyedropper tool to determine to our transparent key color. The high and low threshold options adjust the luminance value of the key. Like smoothing in Premier, blurs smooth the edges by the amount of anti aliasing being applied. To crop off the sides of our video, we simply went to tools-video, and then video effects/pan and crop, this allows to trim our video, just like we did in Premier. [Demo] Final Cut Pro When using Final cut Pro, we click on the video filters tab, then click key. Three areas for keying pop up. Key on chroma, key on saturation, and key on luminous. We can adjust the center on control to raise and lower the hue and saturation levels of the key. We can also do this by adjusting the color gradient scale. [Demo] Also, on the key on chroma area is the width option, which adjusts the top handles that allow you to select a larger and smaller range of colors that are keyed based upon the original color that was selected with the eyedropper tool. The saturation and luminous areas adjust the level of saturation and luminance that contributes to defining your key. Edge then allows users to modify the keyed area by shrinking or expanding it. Basically, allowing you to control a gradient key by filling in the small gaps and adjusting the edges and borderlines. Softening takes out the edges, creating a smoother transition between the affected and unaffected parts of the image. This can also be adjusted by the bottom handles of the center on control. The bottom handles allow you to define the tolerance of your key. [Demo] No matter what software program editing with, now you have the ground work to get the job done. In our next segment, we are gong to look at even more tricks, so we can max out what we just learned in this segment. Videomaker Your guide to creating and publishing video. High quality copies of these video, as well as additional DVDs, books, and digital downloads, and more are available at videomaker.com/vstore. [Music Playing]