Green Screen

New_Zealand

New_Zealand

Veteran
Can Vegas Pro do Green Screen edit? I have a scene where just an upper part of a body is dragging himself across the floor of a house. So the thought would be to wrap green cloth around the lower part of the body.
 
The green wrap will work, I recommend shooting the scene one stop brighter then you intend in your final footage so you get a cleaner image. In post you can adjust your exposure back to where it should be. Also for the missing limbs effect, once you key out the green you might be left with an edge where the green wrap meets the pants or skin of you talent. This will probably need some work in post to make that edge look more realistic. Of course the actual angle you shoot will have lots to do with what will be needed in post, so just keep that in mind for consideration.
 
Vegas can do a key and remove the green (though it's not that good at it), you will still need to put something in the hole. If the camera is moving you'll need to use something more advanced (mocha most likely). If it's not moving you'll need to shoot a backing plate. The trick to this is to make sure the shadows and lighting match. When you add actors to the scene the lighting on the background will change. This is why replacement shots almost always have to leave the NLE and go into something more advanced (After Effects/Nuke/Fusion) to get a clean plate and to blend it with the footage. If the camera doesn't move and you are careful with getting the backing plate shot you may be able to do this in Vegas, but I wouldn't count on it.
 
msorrels is right - making something transparent is one matter, but what are you going to show through the transparent bit? This will need some careful shot planning so you can use some sort of background plate. And be very careful with lighting too - e.g. getting that fake body top to cast a believable shadow will be difficult (in Vegas or anything else).
 
Watch bts of Ashton Kutcher in the butterfly effect. If you use google you can find some discussion on the artist who did the vfx work.
 
msorrels said:
Vegas can do a key and remove the green (though it's not that good at it), you will still need to put something in the hole. If the camera is moving you'll need to use something more advanced (mocha most likely). If it's not moving you'll need to shoot a backing plate. The trick to this is to make sure the shadows and lighting match. When you add actors to the scene the lighting on the background will change. This is why replacement shots almost always have to leave the NLE and go into something more advanced (After Effects/Nuke/Fusion) to get a clean plate and to blend it with the footage. If the camera doesn't move and you are careful with getting the backing plate shot you may be able to do this in Vegas, but I wouldn't count on it.
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Actually, I disagree -- as NLEs go, Vegas does a pretty good chromakey. It's not as good as the Ultra keyer which is now part of Premiere, or as good as After Effects, but it's pretty good.
 
Last time I looked Vegas had pretty weak spill suppression, but I'm still using Vegas 10. Perhaps it has gotten better?
 
I got the Boris Continuum Key and Blend plug-in for Vegas, and it works great. Easier than the Vegas built-in keyer. Also, it comes with extras, like the ability to wrap a hint of the background plate color around the edges of the foreground object.

P.S. -- I'm using it with Vegas Pro 12, 64 GB of system RAM, and 2GB of video RAM, nVIDEA chipset. No problems.:thumbsup:
 
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