How to Make a Blue Screen Composite Video with Adobe Premiere Pro

Here is a click-by-click, task-oriented description of how to use Adobe Premiere Pro to perform the blue screen compositing function. It is very finicky, however, difficulty of learning is offset by subsequent ease of use.

Our goal is to use chroma keying to make a composite that combines two video scenes, a foreground scene and a background scene. Chroma keying works only if you posed your foreground subject against a reasonably uniform blue or green screen.

The foreground and background should be in the same video format. To achieve the highest quality, use the best-quality video that you have for both the foreground and the background.

Chroma keying works by making the blue pixels of the foreground scene's video transparent, allowing the background video to show through where the foreground pixels were blue. Using chroma keying is vastly easier than editing each image in a video clip by hand.

Blue Screen Compositing: Step by Step Procedure

1. Find the video file that contains your foreground video. If this video is not already in the Project window, use File, Import to bring it in. Then drag the foreground video's icon from the Project window to the Timeline window's Video 2 track. Make sure that its audio goes onto a timeline track, too.
2. Find the video file that contains your background video and use File, Import if necessary. Drag the background video's icon to the Timeline window's Video 1 track.
3. If padlock symbols show to the left of any of your timelines, unlock the video by clicking on them.
4. Slide the two videos left or right to align their desired parts in time (neither one can ever slide to the left of time zero). In many cases, this means positioning a short foreground clip above the desired part of a longer background clip.
5. Note that the right-hand Monitor window shows what the Video 2 track, if there is anything in Video 2, and otherwise shows what is in Video 1. To see the background behind the interval where your foreground covers it, click the Eye icon at the left of the Video 2 timeline, to turn the foreground video off temporarily.
6. Window, Effects adds a tab to the top of the Project window that you can use to see a list of effects rather than seeing the list of video files.
7. Click this new Effects tab and Keying and Chroma key. Then drag the Chroma key icon down on top of the foreground video in the Timeline's Video 2 track.
The copyright of the article How to Make a Blue Screen Composite Video with Adobe Premiere Pro in Multimedia Education is owned by Palmer W. Agnew. Permission to republish How to Make a Blue Screen Composite Video with Adobe Premiere Pro in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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