Bra Productions - Sketches | Fresh Videos | Tutorials

So i have followed the exact instructions that are given in your tutorial for Sony Vegas. Everything works out well such as taking away the green screen and making everything but the talent black. But when i'm trying to replace the black of the background with a picture or even video, the black remains there but you can see pieces of the background picture or video behind the black. I noticed that my video is shot in widescreen and i was wondering if that had anything to do with it. I do not know how to shoot any other way then widescreen. And i also noticed that in your tutorial of green screen in Sony Vegas the video is not widescreen but instead is fitted into the whole preview screen that Sony Vegas provides. Please help me! Thank you!

Did you actually fill the space with black color or did you use the "Show Mask Only" option and the Threshold sliders set the background color black?

Basically what should happen is anything that was black colored in the Show Mask mode should be transparent in your timeline.

The fill the preview screen was done by unchecking "Maintain Aspect Ratio" under Pan/Crop settings for the background element.

i used the show mask only option, just like the video showed me how to. But my video is in widescreen so theres a black bar on top and on bottom of the the video and i also wanted to take those off.

"Basically what should happen is anything that was black colored in the Show Mask mode should be transparent in your timeline."

Thats what i don't understand. The black color from the show mask remains there and is not transparent in my timeline. The background picture i place in is not transpiring through and can only be seen on the edges of the black.

Removing the letterbox areas would be done by setting the frame size.

What you might want to do is start the project over using the footage to create the project size from the start.

In Vegas choose File -> New -> then click the folder icon next to Template: settings on the right.  Choose your video then OK.  That will set the Project Size for your Project to be widescreen just like your file.

As for the black color bleed through, I'm still confused about that.   You turned off 'Show Mask' right?  If the file isn't too large you might want to upload it so I could take a look to see if I get the same results you are?  Maybe even just trim off a minute of the footage or something?

ok ill upload you the footage, its just a test footage.. the link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7pT9kZQhtg

thank you for all the help btw i really needed it.. if u can or have any spare time can you give me step by step directions on how to do the whole green screen thing with this footage

Ahh, I see the problem... shadows!   Bane of greenscreeners everywhere.  You really need a uniform color background, with as little shadows as possible.

Here's a good example (taken from How to Make a Green Screen )

Notice it's the same green color throughout, with no shadows.  That's ideal.

Here's your screen:

There's 15-20 or so shades of green and shadow in there, not ideal.

Playing around with settings I was able to get a pretty decent mask using these settings with a red background:

(Right click -> View Image to read the values/details on this picture)

[R: 43 G: 129 B: 45, Low: 0.381, High: 0.333, Blur: 0.072]

Main problem was that your t-shirt kept getting masked out, spots on your forehead, cheeks and shoulders were popping in and out of the mask, as were spots above and to the right of your head and to the right of your head, looking at the camera.  You also appear to be missing your ears!  Eep!

I was also running into the same problems you were with backgrounds not showing up.  VIDEO backgrounds appeared just fine, but 4 out of 5 static image backgrounds didn't.  I think this is because of the drastic mask settings we've had to use.

What I'd suggest is trying your video shoot again, but with better lighting.  Try lights to the both sides of you and below you shooting up.  The idea is to elimiate shadows on the green and to make it uniformly bright.  If you can use some diffused lighting that helps too.  It can be something as simple as facing the light away from you onto a large white paper or table cloth or something to reflect back diffused light instead of direct light.

I'm pretty sure it was the shadows causing you problems, so try with the new lighting ideas from that link about and see if you don't have better luckc with it.

If you're experiencing from shadows, you could always reposition your light, or green screen, or you could simply move your settings a bit further away from your green screen.

Hi, I'm kinda new to Sony Vegas. (I'm using Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10.0) A friend of mine has the same program and we made a green screen video. We were at my house so he used my program, but it wouldn't work. He tried it later at his house and it did. He can't explain why. Are there any settings that I may have wrong? I did everything you told anthony2simon to do. The problem is that I can't get the picture to fill in for the green screen. It's either the picture by itself, or the video by itself. Got any ideas?