Compositing Mentor

For those striving to learn as much about compositing as possible

  • Home
  • My Portfolio
  • About Me / Contact

Advanced Keying Template Playlist

Posted by compositingmentor on May 27, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. 2 Comments

I’ve consolidated all the Advanced Keying Videos to a single playlist on Youtube so you guys can easily view them in order and all in 1 place.  This should make it much easier to pass around to people, or to revisit them all at once.


I’ll work on getting them up on some other media sites like vimeo for those that down particularly like youtube.

-Tony

Advertisements

Interview with CoreMatte.com

Posted by compositingmentor on February 23, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a comment

Matt from CoreMatte.com was kind enough to do an interview with me about my work in the VFX industry and my tutorial blog.

http://www.corematte.com/blog/interview-with-compositor-tony-lyons/

I recommend you check it out if you want to learn a bit more about me and my background in VFX as a compositor.  This was my very first interview and I am truly honored.  I also recommend checking out the rest of corematte.com for more interviews and tutorials!

Thanks Matt for taking the time to put together this interview.

Hopefully I will have more tutorials out for you guys soon.

Best,

Tony

Advanced Keying Breakdown: 4.1 – Template

Posted by compositingmentor on December 18, 2015
Posted in: Advanced Keying Breakdown. Tagged: advanced, bluescreen, breakdown, chroma, comp, compositing, creative, creative lyons, greenscreen, keying, lyons, mentor, nuke, template, tony, Tony Lyons, tutorial, vfx, Visual effects. 3 Comments


0:00 – Introduction
4:30 – CC and transform after key
6:49 – CC and transform before key
12:03 – Advanced Keying Template flowchart
15:25 – Advanced Keying Template
40:10 – Advanced Keying Template Compressed
40:55 – Advanced Keying walkthrough script
41:59 – outro


 

Hey guys,

Sorry for the long overdue tutorial wrapping up this keying series. Here is the advanced keying template video, along with a flowchart and download link to the template scripts, which you can save to your toolsets for your own use in your nuke scripts.

Here is the Template Flow Chart from the video for you to download and review:
advanced_keying_template_flowchart_3

Here is the download to the Advanced Keying Template Package:

Advanced Keying Template Package Download

Or download from Nukepedia

Package contains:
Advanced_Keying_Template_v06_.nk
Advanced_Keying_Template_Compressed_v06_.nk
Advanced_Keying_Template_Walkthrough_v01_.nk


Some of you have asked for source materials for keying practice.  I can provide you with a few free downloads so you can practice.

https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/support/user-guides/#nuke  – download the nuke keying assets

http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/learn1/ – scroll down to 2d compositing | Compositing Basics.  Click on the link that says Download Assets for Basic Workflows (535 MB).  Here you will find the girl and desert  BG found in this tutorial.

https://mango.blender.org/ – Tears of steal open source project.  Free 4K footage for people to download and practice.  Highly recommended.  scroll down to the blog post called ALL 4K FRAMES – NOW AVAILABLE ON XIPH.ORG.



Finally, I want to thank everyone for your continued support, views, shares, comments, and emails.  It all means a lot to me and you’ve certainly motivated me to keep going. Thank you.

As always, if there are any questions, just leave a comment or shoot me an email and I will try my best to respond.  Hopefully with this series of tutorials, and now this template, you guys will be fully equipped to handle even the toughest of keys.

Until next time!

Advanced Keying Breakdown: MERGING 3.1 – Premulting, Overs, Addmix, & CCs

Posted by compositingmentor on February 3, 2015
Posted in: Uncategorized. 5 Comments

Explaining Premultiplicaiton and unpremultiplication. Breakdowns of Over and Addmix, and tricks to gamma the alpha before overing. Also at the end, talking about the importance of unpremulting before color corrections (wrong and right ways to do CCs).

This tutorial uses basic colors with a transition to teach these merging techniques and the math behind them. The math and techniques are the same for complex images and alphas, but I felt it was easier to demonstrate this way. If you are bored by the beginning sections (they can be a bit basic), I’d highly recommend skipping ahead to the “gamma-ing the alpha before an over” section. I Hope this de-mystifies some complex concept of merging images, and how to use the addmix tool.

Should be 1 more tutorial left (with a possible bonus to the despill section), presenting a template script and explaining how I have put together all of these concepts we have discussed in order to bring a full key together.  This includes tips and tricks to getting around common problems in keying, despilling, and merging.  I hope to have this to you guys soon.

0:00 Intro
2:01 Multiplying (how alphas are applied, premult and unpremult)
4:56 Adding
5:47 Over – Breakdown (math explained)
8:28 Overing an unpremultiplied image
10:21 Overing a double premultiplied image
13:42 Gamma-ing the Alpha before an Over
18:36 Gamma-ing the Alpha (practical example)
19:56 Addmix Breakdown
26:41 Addmix Techniques
30:25 Unpremulting before Color Corrections
42:03 Outro

Thanks for all those that are watching and learning.  I am really glad I can help.

Cheers,

Tony Lyons

Advanced Keying Breakdown: DESPILL 2.2 – Despill Techniques

Posted by compositingmentor on November 20, 2014
Posted in: Advanced Keying Breakdown. 4 Comments

 

 

Heres a tutorial about how to despill in ways to customize the color of the despill.  We move away from gray despills towards more useful colors, such as the BG or the subject.  Here I go over keylight, huecorrect, talk about keeping luminance values and using the BG’s Luminance to affect the despill color.  I then talk about combining despills just like combing keys, and show a little trick with the alpha’s gamma prior to merging over.  More to come!

 
0:00 Keylight for despilling
6:00 Adding luminance back
11:45 Using BG luminance
15:51 Despill matte desaturate fix (finding max of each channel)
18:42 Hue correct for despilling
23:03 Comp example with different despills
28:46 Combining despills
31:10 Bonus: Alpha gamma before over
34:01 Comparison, final thoughts

 

Thanks for all your support!

– Tony

Advanced Keying Breakdown: DESPILL 2.1 Initial Concepts

Posted by compositingmentor on July 28, 2014
Posted in: Advanced Keying Breakdown. Tagged: advanced, alpha, anthony, blue, bluescreen, breakdown, chroma, comp, compositing, concepts, creative, despill, foundry, green, greenscreen, IBK, key, keying, keylight, lyons, nuke, screen, tony. 2 Comments

0:00 intro
0:40 what is despill?
3:40 Separating the Despill process from the Alpha process
7:33 Core Despill and Edge Despill

Hey guys,

I’m going over the first section of Despilling.  I talk about what despill is, why you need to remove it,  how it should be separated from the alpha process, and combining core and edge despills.

The 2 main goals of despilling are:

1.) Removing any spill while still maintaining the original colors in the plate
2.) Blending the subjects edges with a BG colors

 

http://nukestation.com/vkeyer-tutorial/

Here is the link to a great despill tutorial which goes over blending BG colors using the difference matte of a despilled plate –> to the original plate.   If you are new to the concept of blending your despill with the background then you are really going to like this video.  He talks about flame in the beginning of the video and switches to nuke later.

Thanks for watching, next I’ll go over how to achieve and control the despill to get what you need.

– Tony

Advanced Keying Breakdown: ALPHA 1.4 – IBK Stacked Technique

Posted by compositingmentor on July 19, 2014
Posted in: Advanced Keying Breakdown. Tagged: advanced, bluescreen, breakdown, chroma, color, comp, compositing, foundry, gizmo, greenscreen, IBK, keyer, keying, lyons, nuke, stacked, technique, tips, tony, tutorial. 2 Comments

Sorry for not posting in a couple months, I have been traveling and working.  But I am ready to finish off this series.  I think you guys will like this one because I go over some techniques on the IBK workflow.  The first part of the video I show you a comparison between how I usually see IBK being used and the IBK stacked technique.  There are 4 examples (a greenscreen, a bluescreen, a hair problem, and a shadow problem) that I go over and explain the concept of what the IBK is doing, and the importance of the IBK Color, or cleanplate.

Next I give you a step by step breakdown of how to setup this IBK stacked techniques by building these 4 examples from scratch.  If you are already familiar with IBK and want to jump into the step by step process of this stacked technique, you can just to 7:09 (Step by Step process, example 1 greenscreen).

0:00 Intro
0:45 Comparison 1 greenscreen example
3:54 Comparison 2 bluescreen example
4:31 Comparison 3 hair example
5:53 Comparison 4 shadows and markers example

7:09 Step by Step process, example 1 greenscreen
17:12 step by step example 2 bluescreen
22:15 step by step example 3 hair and assisted eroding
27:37 step by step example 4 shadows / cleanplate customization
37:12 Outro

At one point, my cursor disappears in the recording.  Something must have gone wrong during the recording process, but you should still be able to see me clicking and marquee-ing stuff.

I’m glad to be moving onto the despill section, as I think it usually is overlooked.  In reality it’s just as important as the alpha, if not MORE important.

Cheers,

Tony

Posts navigation

← Older Entries
  • Top Posts & Pages

    • Advanced Keying Breakdown - ALPHA 1.1: pre-processing the GS
    • Advanced Keying Breakdown: DESPILL 2.2 - Despill Techniques
    • Advanced Keying Breakdown: ALPHA 1.4 - IBK Stacked Technique
    • Advanced Keying Breakdown Series: Introduction
    • Advanced Keying Template Playlist
    • Advanced Keying Breakdown: MERGING 3.1 - Premulting, Overs, Addmix, & CCs
    • Advanced Keying Breakdown: 4.1 - Template
    • Advanced Keying Breakdown – ALPHA BONUS: Eroding and Feathering Mattes
  • Recent Posts

    • Advanced Keying Template Playlist
    • Interview with CoreMatte.com
    • Advanced Keying Breakdown: 4.1 – Template
    • Advanced Keying Breakdown: MERGING 3.1 – Premulting, Overs, Addmix, & CCs
    • Advanced Keying Breakdown: DESPILL 2.2 – Despill Techniques
  • Recent Comments

    Paul L on HighPass Gizmo: tutorial +…
    Vitor Teixeira on Advanced Keying Template …
    anwar on Advanced Keying Breakdown: 4.1…
    Кеинг (Keying) Advan… on Advanced Keying Breakdown: ALP…
    Кеинг (Keying) Advan… on Advanced Keying Breakdown: DES…
  • Blog Stats

    • 99,050 hits
  • Archives

    • May 2016
    • February 2016
    • December 2015
    • February 2015
    • November 2014
    • July 2014
    • May 2014
    • April 2014
    • August 2013
    • July 2013
    • February 2013
  • Categories

    • Advanced Keying Breakdown
    • AE to Nuke
    • general updates
    • gizmos/tools
    • Uncategorized
  • Meta

    • Register
    • Log in
    • Entries RSS
    • Comments RSS
    • WordPress.com
  • Advertisements
Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.
Compositing Mentor
Blog at WordPress.com.
Cancel