Simpler Work Flow for Green Screen

Hi,
I’m a stop motion animator, and I use a lot of green screen to make epic shots, such as when I need an army, I animate the same characters doing different things and composite them all together, however, my current workflow for this is slow and unwieldy. Here it is, I begin with my background shot in the VSE, import one of my green screened shots, then use a transform strip to place it where I want it over the background, then, I export that, import it into the compositor, and chroma key it to remove the green screen, using the background image as the bottom of my alpha-over. Then, I export that shot, and repeat my process, using the exported shot as my new background. Is there a quicker way to do this? Please help.

Its less fiddly but theres no easy answer because there is no keyer in the VSE. But try this:

  1. Make a scene for each Green Screen shot. E.g. Scene-Shot01. Load a clip and make the scene duration match the clip length.
  2. Only use the compositor in that scene to key the image.
  3. In the VSE editing scene and the background.
  4. Above the background and a scene strip e.g. Scene-Shot01 and trim it to the part that you want. In its strip properties set blend type to Alpha Over.

Assuming that your key is fairly simple and that the dimensions match the VSE scene it should render fairly quickly. You can also reduce the dimensions off all the scenes to lighten the CPU load.

Yes for this kind of shot working with blender is a bit hard.
The best way would be the VSE to edit greenscreen footage, Compositor to do the keying, and 3D view to put them in place.
Sadly they don’t work well together.

You can look into Natron : http://natron.fr/
It’s an opensource compositing software , it works a bit like blender compositor but is more powerful.

The best tool for your task may be Adobe After Effect as it allow easy editing and compositing.

Here is the VSE chroma keyer workflow I made off the back of this request. You can have a general purpose keyer in the VSE. Just place the source footage into the metatrip and alter the values in the blur FX. Its not awesome but you can you can easily do it. So now you have more options :smiley:

This isn’t an open source option, but if you need a lot of green screening, you may want to consider Davinci Resolve. It’s free for everything you need, and it’s incredibly powerful with color editing. Plus, it’s available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I use it for anything more complicated than simple video editing, since the Blender VSE can’t handle too much gracefully.

No audio handling on linux unless you have the BM card $$

Hey cool trick with the VSE 3pointEdit !
This VSE never ceased to amaze me, at least when it’s in good hands !

Hahaha, thanks! VSE can do lots of cool stuff. Can’t wait to see how cool Eevee display engine is in 2.8.