How to Key in Premiere Pro CS5

Hey, everybody David Basulto, Filmmakingcentral.com inside my absolute favorite
editor Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. It is blazing fast and has so many wonderful features
that I’m going to be doing tutorials on. But today, I want to show one of the key points of
why you should buy Premiere Pro CS5.

It is a no brainer. It’s going to speed up tons of your workflows. So let’s take a look. And
what I’m talking about is the new Ultra Key here which has been around for awhile.
Actually I remember years ago going to the DV Expo and seen the ultra guys doing I
think it's visual communicator then, but it was an amazing tool that I saw them chroma
keying stuff and doing live presentations and just like you know the networks. And I
thought well, that is really cool. And long behold Adobe bought the company and has
done some stuff with it but never enough of course to satisfy our taste and of course on
CS5 since it's the ultra amazing editor they added it to it. So I’m going to show how
awesome it is.

You view this have some green screen footage here, my friend Valerie Mchuffrey casting
director, we worked a little project that we’re just putting together really quickly to see if
we wanted to go forward with it. I just threw up a green screen with some crappy lights
with the head. And as you could see at the time, you know, we get a lot of creases here.
We’ve got shadows. It's just looking like hell, which would terrify anybody.

So, I was just going to you know key it out and put some different backgrounds back
there and then add some graphics, and used just kind of a test. It was like spur of the
moment thing. Don’t think I’m that horrible in green screen setting up.

Okay! So what we’re going to do here though is like I clipped a little bit here in our
timeline, I want to go into the search effects panel, and you see the effects panel right
here, in your area are down here. I’m typing ultra and it’s right there. If you'll also go into
video effects scheme then you’ll find ultra. And just dragging on, and all I do is just
double click on my footage, going to the effects control, you’ll see it right here, ultra.

One of the things I do why I like to key is of course find the darkest points. So, I’m going
to take my little eyedropper and I’m going to look around here in this little shadow area
and just click on that. And now it’s fine. If you look back key color, it’s pretty dark. And
you can see that it’s done a little something but nothing what we need. So, I’m going to
go into alpha channel mode. Now everything in white I want and everything in black or
in gray, I want to be black. So let’s go into the math generation. And transparency, I want
– I’m going to leave that back in that 45 range.

For now, I’m going to mess around with the highlights a little bit, if I blow them out,
you’ll see what happens. So, let’s bring them down, taking lot of the highlights out, and
we’re going to the shadows, and now you see it.

Now if bring the shadows way down, you’ll see I've got all these holes here which is not
good because that’s going to be transparent. So, let’s bring the shadows back up a little
bit, change to 75 tolerance -- around. We’re going to go into pedestal. If I crank the
pedestal up to say 50, you’ll see I’m getting a really nice key. And lets’ just go back into
the composite mode and check on it. So there she is, and if I press the play button here,
we can see. That’s a pretty damn a good key. That little spill going on and of course now
we can fix that. So, let’s -- I’m going to leave the math generation alone. I’m going to go
into the math cleanup, I’m going to show maybe let’s just get three to see how that looks.
And that’s pretty good.

I mean this is a – it blows me away every time I do these that’s why I have moment of
silence. So the choke is actually choking it in a little bit bringing in the edges. You can
also go into your spill suppression, if you wanted to desaturate it or mess with the spill a
little bit. So let’s just bring that down to maybe spill -- let’s go to 45, see what happens
there, and we just grab --.

One of the things you'll notice is I’m scrubbing a timeline and look how fast is this move.
And this isn’t my machine that has a quadro in it. So, this just has the normal low ATI
card and with the new mercury engine is blazing fast.

Okay, so that’s it. Let me take a look. Let’s bring in something behind her. Let’s bring of
her footage up at one level. So we have it on to video track 2. I have something here,
footage, let's just bring this in here. And now reset and let’s go into this footage here and
we’ll scale it up and let’s press play. So take a look at that Ultra Keyer, it’s pretty
amazing. I’m going to turn off the Ultra Key for a second. So you’ll see what we’ve
started with? And what we've gone to. And I guarantee you, it’s a color-correcting work.
This will look is really like an amazing shot like she’s there in this really colorful field,
wherever that is. This is art bits footage by the way.

So that’s it. It’s one of the biggest reasons to pick Premiere Pro CS5. It’s just amazing. If
you’re doing green screen work, you don’t want to go into other products, you’re right
there with Ultra Keyer. So check it out. There’s a link below. Try a demo today a full
service 30-day demo. Premiere Pro CS5, I love it. And this is the Ultra Keyer in Premiere
Pro CS5. Thanks so much.