The assets (music, music video and drummer footage) had all been created as tracks in Premiere Pro to be in synch then exported and taken into After Effects. As mentioned in the last post the aim was to ease and synching the music video track could go in as a bottom layer in the timeline as the master to keep in synch with. Then the drummer layer would go over the top. These layers could then each be duplicated for ever song knowing that you could then crop only the elements that you needed for each track (drummer and music video) and they would be in synch. these could then be manipulated in After Effects and the effects and keying done.
So following on from this the process was.
1: Get the music video layer and drummer layer into After Effects composition and timeline. make sure these were in time by starting them both at 00:00:00 in the timeline. As they were synched in premiere Pro they will be exactly in time. Checking the audio made sure of this.
2: Shrink the whole tracks down to just the song you were using. This was done through the cut from one music video to the next and the drummer shot changing too. This way you would only be working on one track at a time.
3: Key out the green on the drummer shot. This was done using the Keylight feature and fine tuning the key to get a nice screen matte around the drummer. Some shots here were a nightmare. The fundamental basic of chromakey are if you are using a green screen to not have any green on the subject. This is nearly impossible on a drum kit due to all of the reflective surfaces, if a matte un-shiny drum kit exists I needed one! The reflective surfaces cannot do anything but reflect some of the green. Some shots were easy some very difficult BUT overall got pretty close on the awkward ones by lots of fine tuning. On some there was the need to paint in the offending areas on the Screen Matte by hand to make sure they worked.
4: Apply the key. With the music video layer underneath the drummer layer if you select the music video and Track Matte this makes the music video layer go within the outline and shape of the drummer playing the drums.
5: Re-position, slightly re-scale and tweak the drummer and video layers to make for the best composition and the elements. It is no good having an Oasis music video and not placing it so you could best see the band members performing. This could be really fiddly in places as in one music video clip I sometimes needed to re-position the footage every different shot in the music video to get this looking good.
6: In order to put the drummer back over the footage and his silhouette created by the music video visuals another layer was needed. From looking at tutorials there were lots of possible techniques to do this and I tested a few. However the most effective was to duplicate the drummer layer putting it on the top of the other two. then by putting on a tint effects to make it black and white, adjust the curves to get a more contrasted image. This also gave it a retro feel and captured the late 1960's era. Next using the composition window to view all of the layers change the opacity of this top layer to reveal the drummer silhouette filled with the music video. This needed fine tuning so that there was a good balance between the drummer B/W overlay and the image underneath.
This process worked well but was hugely time consuming taking over a couple of days to get it mastered, but now a basic version of the techniques and full piece was done.
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