VFX Keying: Master Course

Course details

Blue-screen and green-screen keying is the bread and butter of visual effects compositing. Every VFX artist must master this complex subject to succeed in the industry. This course offers 12 hours of the most comprehensive and detailed training ever produced on the subject of keying, covering literally every aspect of the job. You can follow along with NUKE, the software featured in the videos, or with any other compositing software that offers floating-point math. NUKE master trainer Steve Wright introduces several overall compositing workflows, as well as a myriad of tips and tricks and several keying techniques never before published. Learn about green-screen, blue-screen, luma, and saturation keys; spill suppression; color correction; edge refinement; and more. Plus, get a bonus appendix chapter of tutorials on keyers such as KEYLIGHT, Primatte, Ultimatte, and others.

Learning objectives
Creating an uber key
Keying green-screen vs. blue-screen footage
Preprocessing footage
Building a clean plate
Making luma keys
Keying on hue and saturation
Pasting keys together
Grain management
Saving time with garbage mattes
Using spill suppression
Improving edges
Color correcting keys
Sweetening the comp
Alternative compositing workflows
Fixing edge problems
Using KEYLIGHT, Primatte, Ultimatte, and other tools

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Welcome
02 - Exercise files

1. Keying Workflows

03 - A look at different keying workflows
04 - Creating an uber key
05 - The nature of grain and noise
06 - Green-screen vs. blue-screen keying
07 - Which keyer is best

2. Pre-Processing the Green Screen

08 - Step 1 - Analyze the clip
09 - How to manage grain and noise
10 - Pre-processing the clip for the keyer
11 - Screen-correction workflow
12 - Tips on adjusting the IBKColor node
13 - How the IBKColor assist works
14 - Building a clean plate from a clip
15 - Building a clean plate without an IBK node
16 - Working with a real clean plate
17 - Retaining shadows with screen corrections
18 - Stack IBKColor nodes for cleaner clean plates
19 - Good (and bad) tracking markers
20 - Tracking marker removal techniques
21 - Removing tracking markers with screen correction

3. Other Types of Keys

22 - Unleashing the power of your luma keys
23 - How to make even more powerful luma keys
24 - Keying on hue
25 - Keying on saturation
26 - Discovering NUKE's hidden chroma keyer
27 - Keying with just one channel
28 - How to create a color difference key
29 - How to create a texture key

4. Building the Uber Key

30 - How to cut and paste keys together
31 - Which math operation to use and when
32 - Assisting the keyer with additional keys
33 - Using garbage mattes to save time
34 - Creating core mattes for solid keys

5. Spill Suppression

35 - What is spill
36 - How spill suppression works
37 - Spill suppression with the Hue Correct node
38 - Spill suppression with gizmos
39 - How to prevent despill artifacts
40 - How to fix despill artifacts
41 - Adjusting the spill luminance and color
42 - Steve Wright's adaptive despill

6. Compositing Techniques

43 - The classic Premultiply Merge over
44 - Improving edges with an AddMix comp
45 - How to do a soft comp hard comp
46 - The processed foreground technique
47 - Adding edge detail with an additive keyer

7. Color Correcting

48 - Effects of color correction on pixels and pictures
49 - The Grade node vs. the ColorCorrect node
50 - Premultiply and unpremultiply
51 - How to match grade two clips
52 - Color match keyed layers workflow

8. Workflow Examples

53 - Compositing keyer outputs
54 - The basic uber key composite
55 - Soft key hard key with luminance adjusted despill
56 - Uber key with split soft key and split despill
57 - Uber key with the additive keyer
58 - Screen correction with adaptive despill
59 - Screen correction with a processed background

9. Sweetening the Comp

60 - How to apply light wrap to your comp
61 - When to use edge blending
62 - Adding interactive lighting
63 - Animating the interactive lighting
64 - Easy ways to synthesize shadows
65 - How to QA your comp

10. Fixing Edge Problems

66 - Sculpting your key edges
67 - Recoloring the RGB edges
68 - Replacing discolored edges - Theory
69 - Replacing discolored edges - Practice

11. Special Keying Solutions

70 - How to add more hair detail
71 - The special case of keying blond hair
72 - Keying for more semitransparency
73 - Techniques for better motion blur
74 - How to retain all of the depth of field
75 - Special keying techniques for smoke
76 - Extra special keying techniques for fire
77 - How to key a cloud out of the sky
78 - Keying reflections off of glass techniques
79 - How to cope with bad video

12. Appendix - Keyer Tutorials

80 - About the Keyer Tutorials appendix
81 - KEYLIGHT - Setting up a basic composite
82 - KEYLIGHT - Masking, fine-tuning, and spill suppression
83 - KEYLIGHT - Viewing status and multipass keying
84 - Primatte - Basic keying and spill suppression
85 - Primatte - Matte refinement and edge detail
86 - Primatte - Auto-Compute and advanced spill suppression
87 - Primatte - New features in Primatte V
88 - IBK keyer - Keying and compositing
89 - Ultimatte - Basic setup
90 - Ultimatte - Overall workflow
91 - Ultimatte - Matte tools and shadows
92 - Ultimatte - Spill suppression