The Art and Science of Green Screen Keying, Part 1

Taught by Victor Perez

Course Number:
NUK235
Software Version:
v10 
Original Run Date:
May 2016 
Duration:
5 hours 21 minutes 
vfx
Pulling a key from a greenscreen is one of the basic skills for any compositor but only the most skilled artists can create the illusion of the integration of an extracted green screen element with other CG layers to make it look like it was shot at the same time, with the same camera and lenses under the same lights. For a compositor there is more to see than just green pixels and an alpha channel. The elaboration of a green screen or blue screen requires both fine artistic eye and a methodological mindset.

Professor Victor Perez has designed this two-part course to teach you all the available keying tools in Nuke X and how to use them to pull a key as a real pro. In part one of the course, Victor provides a detailed overview of concepts every artist should know regarding keying and then dives into covering the keyers available in Nuke X. 'The Art and Science of Green Screen Keying, Part 1' contains over five hours of instruction as well as footage files (available with our premium membership).

Victor Perez is a senior visual effects artist with over 12 years of production experience in computer graphics, digital grading and visual effects, as well as a NUKE Official Certified Trainer by The Foundry. As a senior digital compositing artist and 2D Technical Director he has a fine combination of both artistic and technical understanding of film post-production and visual effects. Member of Visual Effects Society and usual collaborator of Nukepedia. Victor has worked and researched with Oscar winner studios such as Cinesite and Double Negative and others. His personal web site is http://www.victorperez.co.uk
 
The Art and Science of Green Screen Keying, Part 1
Watch our overview of the course

Class Listing

Class 1

Green vs blue (and what about red?), greenscreen vs rotoscoping, green as a reference (not to be keyed), technical specs for keying, film vs digital, color subsampling (and workaround smoothing), cyan undercut (film issue), grain and noise, compression, screen uniform lighting, greenscreen graded and talent graded plates, script layout for greenscreen composting: Alpha, RGB and BG streams

Class 2

The boolean logic (“Frankensteining”), manual auxiliar mattes:,holdout & garbage mattes and their fusion methods, procedural auxiliar mattes I: procedural holdout and garbage mattes, procedural auxiliar mattes II: edge matte, Nuke’s EdgeDetect, V_EdgeMatte

Class 3

Luminance keying I: Nuke’s Keyer (luminance key operation); Luminance keying II: script setup for a manual luminance Key

Class 4

Color difference keying I: script setup for a manual color difference key; color difference keying II: Keylight™

Class 5

Color difference keying III: Ultimatte™

Class 6

Color difference keying IV: Chromakeyer

Class 7

Colorspace segmentation keying: Primatte™ I

Class 8

Colorspace segmentation keying: Primatte™ II

Class 9

Image-based keying: Nuke’s IBKGizmo & IBKColor

Class 10

Difference keying I: Nuke’s Difference; difference keying II: script setup for a difference key

Class 11

Chroma keying: Nuke’s HueKeyer

Class 12

Minor keying operations: Nuke’s Keyer (saturation key and other operations), solarization (fringe matte)