Shooting videos with compositing in mind Making keying effects work well takes some extra effort. Proper backdrop colors,
lighting, and keying techniques all come into play. You need to consider which key-
ing effect will work best for your project.
Some keys use textures or graphics, so you don’t need to do a whole lot of planning,
but most keying effects take some extra thought and work:
t High-contrast scenes lend themselves to making either the dark or the light
portions transparent. The same holds true for shooting light objects against
a dark background, or vice versa.
t Solid-color backgrounds are fairly easy to make transparent. Take care that
the subjects you
don’t want to key out aren’t wearing clothing with colors that
match the background.
t For most keying shots, you need to use a tripod and lock down your camera.
Bouncing keyed objects creates viewer disconnects. There are exceptions to
this rule: Typically, if you’re keying in wild, animated backgrounds, then camera
movement will not be a problem.
t Most times you want your background (or the other images you’ll insert in the
transparent areas you create with keying effects) to match those keyed shots. If
you’re working with outdoor scenes, try to shoot the keyed shots outside or use
lights balanced for daylight.
Working with the Opacity effect One easy way to see compositing at work is to place a video or graphic on a super-
imposing track and then make it partially transparent—turn down its opacity—to
let videos on lower tracks show through. You can accomplish this using the Opacity
effect. Though it can be very useful, you’ll discover in this exercise that the Opacity
effect’s blanket approach to compositing is not always effective. In certain circum-
stances, you might want to use some other similar Adobe Premiere Pro tools.
In this exercise, you’ll reduce the opacity of several items. Later you’ll learn ways to
achieve more effective results using some of the same clips.
