Digital News Production: AFTER EFFECTS WORKSHOP

Today we had an After Effects workshop to learn more about the programme and how to use green screening and key framing.

With an example piece of footage available for us to use, we imported it into After Effects and began green screening.

We went to effects and found the Keylight effect that helps you remove a colour from the background of an image. We used the eye drop colour tool to click the shade of green we wanted to remove. Luckily the green screen was lit well so it wasn't too difficult to get rid of the background.

Here is the woman without the green behind her.

When then used the tools on the Keylight to turn the view of the screen to 'Status' so we could see a clearer look at if the green screen has actually disappeared fully - if not when we import a background it will become fuzzy when we play it back.

When then opened the 'Screen Matte' button and turned up the 'Clip White' button so that the woman turned fully white. This guaranteed that the background would have disappeared.
We then added in a background and saw the final product of our green screen which I was quite happy with.

Here is another example of the green screening we did today.

We then moved on to editing green screen footage instead of still images.

This time we played around with scaling the image to make the guy smaller and fit in the scene, it was fun to do and we got to try it a lot of times.

Later on in the day, we moved onto learning about tracking. Tracking is the idea that when you write or add something onto footage that's moving (for example writing onto a poster) the writing will track along with the poster and move along with it.

We created a new tracking composition and began tracking. Heres screen shots of what we did below.

We began by finding a good track point to focus on, something solid and clear that the programme will be able to follow.

We then zoomed into the tracking point and made sure the + was in the middle of the point we wanted to track. After doing this we clicked the play button at the far bottom right in the tracking box. The video then followed the tracking spot through and rendered it up.

Here is some tutorials that I looked at afterwards which can help with after effects. videocopilot.net/tutorials

In conclusion, I really enjoyed the after effects tutorial today as although it was a lot to take in, I made sure I took notes and screen shots so that I knew what was happening and could keep up. I learnt a lot about green screening and keying and how to track which may not only be helpful in my digital news production but also in my fiction adaptation unit. I could of improved today by trying out more effects and tracking an actual object however I am still happy with the outcome from today.