How to Do a Green Screen Composite with DaVinci Resolve

If you are working as a colorist, then there are few chances that you will get a pre-keyed footage for processing. Your VFX specialist or editor might have worked upon basic settings and brought the green screen shot for your work. Though DaVinci Resolve is famous for its color grading abilities, since the software updates, you can now composite green screen video footage using the chroma keying feature in it as well. In this article, we will show you how to compositing green screen video footage with DaVinci Resolve and some tips for fine-tuning the result.

How to do a Green Screen Composite in DaVinci Resolve?

If you are ready to perform the Green Screen composite on your DaVinci Resolve platform, then you need to follow these simple steps.

You can watch the video tutorial from ExplainingComputers to follow the steps or read the information below.

step 1: First of all you need to set up your timeline. To do this, simply drag the desired set of video clips and drop them on the media pool of DaVinci Resolve. Next, move to the Edit page and make efforts to drag the element of the green screen clip to the timeline.

step 2: Go to the Color page and then choose your green screen clip. Preview it in the Node Editor window and then create your node.

step 3: Now click the Qualifier palette (the Eyedropper tool) in the toolbar. In the Qualifier palette window, you can isolate the green background from your content with the controls. You can take help from highlight visualize tool to check the black and white form of image that provides information about what is selected on the screen.

step 4: After following all above steps, now you have to select the natural position of green screen clip and then simply move to Selection Range for choosing your Picker icon, and then choose the green part of your video.

step 5: You need to choose the Invert icon from Selection Range. Just click at any random position on your node editor and next choose “Add Alpha Output”. As, the default settings for every project use to be with green screen elements over frames, so when you need to remove them then this invert tool will help you. The ultimate goal is to get a background with complete black appearance whereas subject must have white color.

step 6: Connect the Qualifier node with the Alpha Output.

step 7: Fine Tune your basic green screen video. If you want to improve quality of your content then you can also apply few additional settings in terms of highlight, soft, zoom by doing adjustments for Matte Finesse parameters as per need.

step 8: If there is something that should not appear in the green screen video, you can use the Power Window controls to clear it.

This advanced Power Window feature helps you to isolate few specific portions of image as per need. It allows development of unlimited power windows where you can access gradient, liner, circular and PowerCurve shapes; they can also be combined to create interesting effects using mask controls and matte control facilities. These windows are capable enough to follow objects independently using new single point tracker and multi-point tracker tools.