How to...on Green Screening

[Michael J. Brown]

Does anyone here use the practice of green screening live action people (or other objects) to pull into animations post-production? I'd really like to experiment with this technique and steer clear from the use of animated 3D people (i.e. RPC people, etc.) in the future. They're okay for use with mass-modeled and entry-level quality animations, but I really want to step things up a few notches. I really like the end-product that the likes of Neoscape are putting out.

 

I'll obviously need a post-production application for this, but I don't know which one. Any advice would be great.

 

Thanks.

[BrianKitts]

If you don't have them already I would start with an application that will give you plenty of use beyond green screening for developing your animations.

 

Both AfterEffects and Premiere have chroma key options available.

[RobNJ73]

Agreed on either of the Adobe products... familiarity with Photoshop really flattens out the learning curve on After Effects.

[Michael J. Brown]

Agreed on either of the Adobe products... familiarity with Photoshop really flattens out the learning curve on After Effects.

 

 

Fantastic! I'm quite familiar with Photoshop, so maybe I'll go the After Effects route.

 

I'll be doing some searches for tutorials on the whole process, but are there any that you guys can recommend right off the cuff?

[SandmanNinja]

http://www.heroblob.co.uk/

 

This guy is a genius and (I think) all self-taught. He lists the apps he uses, and has movies he's done VFX for download.

[RobNJ73]

For tutorials on new software, I usually start with the section of the help files that correspond to the specific task I'm trying to achieve. If those seem a little over my head in a new application, then I hunt through Google for more basic tutorials that cover UI, workflow, that sort of thing.

 

http://www.stevengotz.com/ae.htm is basically a portal page linking to a number of different AE tutorials/sites, etc. If you're looking for beginner tutorials, there should be some there.

 

http://library.creativecow.net/tutorials/adobeaftereffects also has some good tutorials too, although most of the ones I've seen there are geared towards showing you how to achieve a specific effect, rather than how to use the software in general.

 

Just a little something to keep you busy...