How to Remove Video Background in Adobe Premiere Pro CC (Tutorial)

 

INTRODUCTION 

one of my tutorials that a lot of people have found helpful is how to remove a green screen in adobe premiere pro so in this video i'm going to show you some more background removal tricks maybe when you don't have a green screen like this video here so we're starting out with a video clip where we don't have a green screen background and i'm probably going to do many examples of these because each clip is going to be different

BRIGHTNESS OR DARKNESS

 so in this case we have a few things to note we have a basically kind of solid even colored bright background so brightness or darkness matters we have a pretty decent line of contrast here so a skin tone might matter as well depending on the contrast between that in the background and also he's wearing a white t-shirt which may give us some problems because it's the same color sort of as these white clouds but i'm going to show you for this example a two layered approach that you can use to still get a pretty decent cut out when it's just not a green screen 

LUMA KEY

so in the effects panel we're going to be using the keying effects and we're going to use a combination of the luma key and the ultra key here i've just got the original clip this is the original clip on track one i'm going to hide that just so we can have it for reference now i'm going to take the clip put it on another track so we can work with it and the first thing we can try is a luma key so luma refers to the luminance or the brightness or darkness basically so in the luma key effect controls you have two things threshold and cutoff 

TRANSPARENT

so you can adjust the threshold at which the video will become transparent and it looks like just it's just becoming black but that's actually just transparency if you actually want to see that displayed as transparency you can click the settings icon and under transparency grid you can check that and you can actually get see like the one that you see in photoshop if that helps you but as i adjust this amount especially from zero to fifty to a hundred percent we see it sort of cuts out him but if we go too far it starts to cut out some of the clouds as well 

THRESHOLD OR VICE VERSA

so you wanna find a balance between the threshold and the cut off where you're just getting a decent selection of your person and you can see kind of how it inverts itself when the cutoff becomes higher than the threshold or vice versa but not to complicate matters you can just kind of balance these two sliders and the goal is to try to get as much of the subject and as little of the background with as clear of a line as possible so this is what that might look like for me but you notice that this is still not perfect if i put it on black again we're still getting you know parts of since this shirt is so bright it it's kind of registering as the background even this highlights on his cheek and that's why i'm offering a two-layered approach here to kind of help you out further

DUPLICATE THIS CLIP 

 so you know depending on your clip if you just want something really rough this could be workable but it's not gonna look great because you're cutting into important parts of the subject like the face so if i were to just duplicate this clip i'll just do that by holding option and click and dragging it on a layer above itself you can also just drag it back over i'll delete the luma key on this effect so we're bringing back the full original clip and i will now use an ultra key as well so just to show you what's going on i'm going to hide everything else except this layer and the ultra key allows you to pick a key color instead of working with brightness and remove that 

GENERATION TOOLS

so i'm going to ink drop over to sort of this really light blue color maybe i can try a few different ones and see which one seems to get a bet the best amount and then i'm also going to open up the matte generation tools and here you can adjust things about the tolerance of this selection so right now at 50 we can increase it so it even goes in more of those blue ranges if you want you can open the matte cleanup and soften things up a little bit this can have a tendency to get a little bit pixelated looking but for the most part we have removed a lot of stuff around here and in this case

CREATE A MASK 

 we're still keeping the parts of the face and for this method since we might get a lot of extra stuff in the corners and the side if you're able to if you're working with something that's not moving across the frame a crazy amount you can even add a mask on the opacity of the layer so if i just create i'll just use the pen tool for this case it'll be easier for a person shape but if i sort of just create a mask on the opacity of the rough outline of this person you'll notice once you get to the end it's kind of hard to make a point a workaround is to zoom out a little bit on the program window and then you can go beyond those boundaries and make those points and then you can put it back to fit if you want 

KEYFRAME ANIMATION 

so now i've really contained in my mask  a little bit more i can add points if i want to bring it in even a little bit more and if you really wanted to get advanced with it and go tedious you could add a keyframe animation onto this mask path so i could begin this mask and if you lose the blue outlines just make sure you highlight mask one again i can begin this kind of opened up enough and if i notice that you know i need more room here for the skateboard flip i can bring out that mask a little bit and then as he puts the skateboard down i can bring it back in so if you want to take this extra step you can sort of animate this mask

BACKGROUND OF YOUR CLIP

 so it tracks your subject a little bit more so again every clip is going to be case by case and these are the different sort of things that might be included in a clip and these are tools that you can use to find solutions to those problems so since we can only key out one color at a time the cool thing with these keys is we can stack them so first i keyed out the blue now let me try to key out this really grayish blue white and this is another issue where i need to be careful because his shirt and his outfit is white as well and you're going to find oftentimes perhaps the color of clothing matches the greenery or background of your clip and these are things to keep in mind 

TOLERANCE

so for this you maybe don't want to increase the tolerance too much but i'm still able to remove even some more of that section in if you really want to get in there that's where you're probably going to want to make sure that mask is really in there so effectively we've removed out much of that stuff and we've used the mask to make sure we don't have to worry about everything else now depending on your clip you know this might be enough but you'll notice this way sometimes kind of get grainy or not the best

ADD AN OPACITY MASK

 so what we've done by combining the two methods is we still get that crisp line and edge from the luma key on the first layer that we did but then we also fill in the remaining portions of those areas using this second layer and i notice there's some clouds here in the luma key layer so it might not hurt to also add an opacity mask on the luma key layer so that we don't have to worry about that as well and although this is not perfect if i add another clip on the background 

CROP ANIMATION 

so that's the original if i add like whatever layer underneath it does provide a pretty decent result and it's up to you know how much key framing and how tight you make that mask to how clean your effect will be but it's still a little bit faster than more of a masking or rotoscoping style where you literally have to mask it exactly on the edge frame by frame that's a job that's much better suited towards after effects and as an added bonus if you want to know how to do that little before and after thing it's just simply a crop effect which is under the transform video effects folder and i simply will add a crop animation 

CONCLUSION

let's just say on the left starts at zero and you can move forward a little bit and make it go to 100 and that'll do like a before and after i have a full tutorial on that if you want like a deeper explanation before and after transitions but that's another example of how to remove backgrounds in adobe premiere if you enjoyed this video you can check out the others on my channel and subscribe to stay tuned for more i'll probably do other examples to show you guys how i would approach those and the unique problems and solutions that other clips would provide my name is justin odisho thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video you