Pinnacle green screen tutorial, anyone?

[Zacatac927]

ok i have just started using Pinnacle studio 9 PLUS and i have been using green screen unsuccessfully ... i am trying to find a tutorial of all the aspects my movie editors green screen ... especially with how to have and explosion used for detonationfilms.com and have it behind trees so it looks like it happened all behind trees and real..not fake..i had an idea of putting a blue screen of where the explosion would be and tape it and then stick on the explosion ...but what will i do with the explosion backround...? yah
zacatac927

[Catscratch44]

Im a new Pinnacle user as well and i've been having problems as well with the green screen tool. I can only use the shot if the Green screen is the majority of the frame so im not sure if u can achieve the look u want

[UFProductions]

Hmmm... what are you using for you're greenscreen? I've found that neon green colours work best with Pinnacle, not necessairily the pure green colours that are recomended. As far as the explosion thing goes, if it's a short scene I might suggest using a picture instead of video. In Photoshop paint over all of the background that appears behind the explosion in the shot, leaving only the foreground that appears in front of the explosion. Using the original picture with nothing removed place the stock footage where you want it and greenscreen out the [explosion] background. Now export this as an AVI file, then reload it into a new project, place the doctored foreground picture over top of it and apply the chroma key feature. What you should now have is an explosion between two layers of the same photo. Starting from the back it would be: Background Photo-Explosion-Foreground Photo. If you need more help I can post pictures and such.

[Carnage7p]

i've got your problem solved

don't use pinnacle for green screening. pinnacle is horrible because it is unstable. none of it's tools are very powerful. pinnacle is about $100, premiere is $200. do yourself a favor and spend a little more to get the better quality editor. or better yet, you could use windows movie maker to edit, and after effects for green screening which is even more powerful. with the two you can do everything that premiere and after effects can do.

[jcdenton]

While Carnage7p may be right when he says you should get better tools the sooner or the later, you probably need a solution for your current tool too.

As UFProductions said, you need to create a masked layer of the trees in the foreground. If the camera stands still, you can use one masked frame for the whole shot. If the camera moves, you need the entire shot as a masked version. You can do this in photoshop, but it's hard to mask things nicely when the material is interlaced, esp. when the objects are moving.

So on video track 1 you have the original shot. Track 2 has the masked explosion. Or even better, an explosion with alpha-transparency. I don't know if your tool does support this. You still can do this frame by frame in photoshop, using 32bit TGA with Alpha channel. Rock, Stones and other particles may not be a problem although you may get a nasty sawteeth when you simply mask them. But the flames, smoke and dust look bad when masked. Those things need to be semitransparent. The easiest way to achieve this is using a 3d tool that creates nice looking explosions and is capable of using additional 2D layers, eg: background layer (original shot), then 3D-explosion with proper transparency etc. then 2D-layer 2 that contains the trees only.
The whole thing could then be saved as an Avi or a sequence of images, depending on the 3D app you would use.
I don't know if there are big lots of tools that are capable of mixing 2D Avis with 3D FX with multiple layers. I could try to program it myself, but it wouldn't be perfect.

In fact I am working on some tools right now. One is timestretch, it will create tween frames based on interpolated mixes.
An other one is a greenscreening thing that takes any number of avis and mixes them using chromacolor and tolerance parameters, as well as parameters for bluring the contours after compositing etc. Not pefect yet, I can't get rid of some weak green shimmer on the contours if the contour was antialiased.
Then I was working on some filters, especially one that I call "becks" (you know, the beer ) that's this gree and blue ampifer as seen in tv ads, that seperates and amplifies green and blue, while it reduces red.

I was thinking about to add some 3D fx as well, I guess I will do that, but I am not sure when this is going to happen. This tool was meant to be an inhouse tool, therefore it isn't that perfect. It's also pretty slow, it may take up to one second or so to process one frame, because the heavy loops where not optimized with assembler.

Maybe you best start to make a masked version of the shot that contains the trees only. It will then be a further task to find a good explosion to be used between the forground layer containting the trees and the original background.

BTW if you cannot afford Photoshop then use "The Gimp", that's for free and features almost the same functionality.

[Raptor]

i've got your problem solved

don't use pinnacle for green screening. pinnacle is horrible because it is unstable. none of it's tools are very powerful. pinnacle is about $100, premiere is $200. do yourself a favor and spend a little more to get the better quality editor. or better yet, you could use windows movie maker to edit, and after effects for green screening which is even more powerful. with the two you can do everything that premiere and after effects can do.

Or get Serious Magic Ultra, for dedicated keying and overlays for about $800.
The question here isn't what to buy, but how to use it witht he tools you have... and Premiere is a tad more than $200, unless you are getting academic discounts... and for some of us it's been a while since we were students LOL.
That being said, in theory to get it behind the tres in any app you will need to build a series of plates or sequences and overlay several layers.
Generally to get the best key, you will need the entire frame filled with your green, or a way to crop the image to the limit of the chroma screen.

[Zacatac927]

yah but guys i got pinnacle for 50 bucks and thats my big budget , and im only 14 so yah know i really don't get money alot... but i am searching for a job ... so anything over 100 is kinda over my head also , jcdenton...how do you mask and what is it?
zacatac927

[jcdenton]

Masking means make parts of it transparent. You do this by painting all the things you want to be removed in the color that WILL be transparent when you use greenscreening.

So basicly you create a copy of the original shot (only the sequence length that is required for the explosion). as I said before, when the camera is not moving, the job will be easy since you will have to mask only one frame. If the camera (and therefore the image) moves, you will need to mask ALL frames.
This can be done by exporting the shot as a sequence of images, edit the images in a painting app, then make an Avi from the images sequence again. I think Pinnacle cannot export sequences of images. So seek for FMP 1.41 in the web (fast movie processor), it's a free tool that let's you do this. There may be other tools withthe same purpose.

So in the end you'll have two movies. One is the original that will be used as the background. The second is the foreground movie that has painted everything green ($00FF00) that is not a foreground tree (although for a tree that is naturally green you maybe better choose an other color as transparency color, if Pinnacle allows other colors, eg. blue).

Now you can use Greenscreening (or bluescreening etc.) on the masked clip. This allows you to use a third video track containting the explosion between the background track and the foreground track. The explosion must be kind of masked too, so the background remains visible partially.

(Of course, masking in AE works diffrent, but this wasn't the question.)

BTW. for 60$ you can get MAGIX video deluxe, that is very cheap. So maybe next time think about it.

[jcdenton]

Zac, back on topic, did you read this tutorial:
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/howto/doc/ho ... ideo_2.pdf
And don't forget the browse the page:
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/howto/Tips.asp?Langue_ID=2