Premiere Pro CC 2015: Compositing Without After Effects!
The compositing tools now available in Premiere Pro make a job that used to take days now take only hours instead. The following example was shot using prosumer Panasonic camcorders on a well-lit green screen into a TriCaster TC40 and switched live. The file format is Quicktime 4:2:2. In post, the file had to be cut at each camera switch. Angle one was put on one track with angle two on another track. I had previously gone into an empty house and shot still backgrounds to use for both angles. Angle one, the interviewer, keyed very well with only one instance of Ultra. Angle two, the old man, had to be duplicated, one on top of the other, in order to use two instances of Ultra. On the top track, I isolated his head using crop, inverted and a mask, in order to get the most detail possible on his messy hair. Ultra here was used in "relaxed" mode. The bottom layer used Ultra in "aggressive" mode. Some tweaking was still needed. Also on the bottom layer, I applied fast color corrector with a mask just on the corner of the table, due a lot of green screen reflection. Since the table is gray, I only needed to lower the saturation until the problem area was eliminated. The background plates were dropped in and matched for each shot. An adjustment layer was used on top to add color grading via the Lumetri color panel to create the illusion of a naturally lit house of an old man. The following is a short sample of a 23-minute interview that was shot in the morning and delivered in the afternoon, thanks to the powerful tools we now have in Premiere Pro CC.