When I put a MP4 video onto the top left display screen the video is far more blurred than the original. Is there anything I can do to correct this ? This is the Movie Studio 2022 Suite. Using Windows 10. Thanks
Hi John, and welcome to the user to user forums.
If you are creating clips with proxy files those proxy files are a lower resolution to aid smoother playback while editing on lower powered machines or if a project gets too complex and using a lot of data. If you need a cleaner image to begin with, import your files without creating proxy files first while you try to clean up or adjust the colour of your clips and then add the proxy files for other effects like adjustments of size etc.
Also make sure you have the small lightning symbol off (Not blue) in the lower right had corner of the preview monitor. By doing either you may experience poor playback performance but sometimes it is a balancing act.
The more powerful the machine the less one has to resort to using some of those methods to get smoother playback.
ray.
Hi Ray,
Thanks for this - but now I'm stuck on the Chroma key. I have a JPG image on the 3rd timeline and the green screen video on the 1st timeline. I have select Chroma keyer on the video effects but I cannot remove the solid green background from the video. Everything I do makes a mess of the video and I can't follow the manual. Can you or someone else give me a step by step guide as to how to do this?
Thanks
Hi,
This might help.
Also, I suggest that you watch my tutorials on basic editing parts 1 and 2 because your first post indicates to me a new user ("When I put a MP4 video onto the top left display screen").
John CB
Hi John.
For once I'm going to wholeheartedly agree with John CB.
Get to grips with the basics first.
Out of all the things to pick in video editing you have picked possibly the hardest one to get right.
Green screening is an art to itself even if you use professionally supplied green screened clips.
The term green screen came about because it was an easier colour to remove from one image and place onto another assuming there was no relative green in the second image. In fact any colour can be chosen as long as that colour is absent in the overlaying video. Even if the colour is close to the one chosen, over-spill (Bleeding) will occur The background colour to remove must be as flawless as possible. No shadows, no creasing, and if shot live, an even amount of lighting on the subject to be extracted. It is as much an art in itself as a process and really easy to get wrong.
The Chroma key effect in the basic effects section of Movie Studio is quite basic and using the 'green' button will only work on a specific tone of green. It would be better to use the 'color' tool and select an area of your green for a better match.
If you have it in your third party effects, the New Blue chroma Key Pro is a much better tool for this with additional controls to help control some of the problems but I must emphasize help control. The controls won't help poor green screen footage much and you do have to get the relationship between each control. It's a bit like taking photographs in full manual mode. If you adjust the aperture of an exposure then often you have to adjust one or both of the other two parameters to compensate only this time you will have around fifteen controls to balance out. .
To initialize the tool click on the video you wish to use it with and then use the apply button. You will then see the image above.
I would suggest starting by setting the Outline and Drop shadow controls all to '0'.
Then use the colour dropper tool to select as large a contiguous area of the green background you want to remove as possible. This will still leave jagged edges and possible small pools of green here and there.
Set the Smooth key to about 50% and very slowly adjust the shrink control forward until you have the most effective outline of your subject. It is rarely perfect. You can try adjusting the color slider next to try to refine the masking. Sometimes it makes it worse not better. If it make it worse then try the next slider down. The Sensitivity slider. You may find with either control that you slide it so far and when pushed further it gets worse. Stop each one at its best point. Increasing one may well allow you to decrease the other until you get the best balance, but it may still not be that good. You can then try adding a very small amount of the 'Shrink' control and that may well sharpen the edge a bit but produce a band around the object. You can try using the feather control to blend this in a bit but again the more controls you use the more you may have to reduce or increase the other sliders. 'Erase split' does not always work on all backgrounds. While using any of these controls watch the background image you are trying to blend into carefully as the green screening effect may bleed onto the background in small pools of green that come and go in patches as the video is played back.
Like I said, it is an art as much as an effect and takes practice and amount of know-how to achieve good results. I haven't even touched on the problems associated with motion blur which can play havoc with using green screen.
There are lots of videos out there about the topic. Some make it look easy but the reality can be quite the opposite if the source material isn't really suitable.
Ray.
Hi Ray
Many thanks for your long email.....appreciate that.
I have already done a number of videos and posted them on YouTube using green screen tech BUT I was using Movie Studio Platinum 17. I saw the price offer a few days ago and so I got the Movie Studio 2022 Suite. As you pointed out above, the green screen method is quite an art but that art is more to do with the actual filming and getting the solid green colour without shades or creases, etc. The process in Platinum 17 was quite straightforward and mostly successful; but I'm very disappointed that the Studio 2022 Suite is really nothing like the more simpler Platinum 17.
Yes we need the basics first but I will probably go back to Platinum 17 and then perhaps go back to 2022 Suite later. Why the designers of Suite 2022 have made things so different (and also more difficult to learn IMO) I really don't know.
Once again, thanks for your willingness to help out.
Regards
John D
Hi
. . . . Why the designers of Suite 2022 have made things so different (and also more difficult to learn IMO) . . . .
The difficulty is due to change of workflows, you will, IMHO, find the Magix Movie Studio much easier once you get used to the workflow.
MMS is also more advanced then VMS ever was - there is a list of tutorials here, they refer to Movie Edit Pro however the principles apply to Movie Studio (new brand name for Movie Edit Pro).
To answer your question on why the design change see this comment.
. . . . The process in Platinum 17 was quite straightforward and mostly successful; but I'm very disappointed that the Studio 2022 Suite is really nothing like the more simpler Platinum 17 . . . .
The Chromakey difficulty is as you have commented getting the good screen screen at the time of shooting.
Using the Chromakey effect is relatively easy as you can see in @browj2 video John CB linked to.
If the green screen colour varies outside of the range the Green chromakey option, you can also try the Color option, dragging out a marquee (selection box) over the varying green area
HTH
John EB
Forum Moderator
Hi John.
It helps you have just said you have come from VMS 17.
Remember the track order for use is reversed in MMS 2022. So you have to think upside down as it were when dealing with applying track effects. So the background goes to the lowest track number and the green screen clip goes to a higher numbered track and apply the green screen effect directly to that track clip. I don't think the actual basic supplied Chroma Key effect is better or worse in either edition but the New Blue one is better if you have it in my opinion for this task.
Vegas just completely stopped support for the Studio version. What you have is a re-badged version of Movie Edit Pro which has been around for years and while maybe not as easy going on a computers hardware, making more demands of it for completing a similar task, in my opinion it is eventually faster in use and an easier workflow once a person gets used to it.
It is a different way of thinking for sure at first but more difficult to learn from scratch than Vegas I'm not so sure about.
I have both programs but started with Movie Edit Pro which I managed to use with little use of having to look at the manual. For me personally it was fairly intuitive once I realise the track order was upside down.
When I got my first copy of Vegas I could do very little without looking up how to do it first. From how to undo a mistake right up to dealing with the export menus.
For me at least using Movie Edit Pro was like using Photoshop. Fairly intuitive. easy to start with.
Vegas Studio on the other hand was like using Gimp. Overly complex although quite powerful and less resource hungry.
Magix Movie Studio is a more processing hungry application than you were used to but things like exporting to various different file types has been made easier or possibly idiot proof for more people and as long as the machine it is on is powerful enough, in my experience is more stable in use and has tons more features. The exporting options may not seem as flexible at first and using the program with an older machine that was already running Vegas Movie Studio 17 must possibly feel like it is crawling along and possibly not as stable or smooth in use.
The forum here is full of people willing to help users coming to terms with the Magix Movie Studio version which is a completely different program than the offerings from Vegas as we have basically been using this version for years. We will be here to help if you ever decide to proceed along this route.
There is nothing wrong with Vegas Studio 17. If it works then use it. It is a capable program.
The problem with any upgrade is it will always be designed with the latest processors and graphics cards in mind. That is where the real increases in performance normally but not always come from.
In my opinion, the only times an upgrade is necessary is if a newly bought camera is either not supported by an existing editor and an upgrade is in order or there is something new in the program you really need as opposed to want is on offer.
The downside of upgrading is the newer program nearly always will behave better on newer or more powerful hardware or one is forced to upgrade due to technical changes in the operating system or changes in the hardware that may not support older coding from older programs. Unfortunately computer software and drivers are not always backwards compatible with older coding.
Ray.