 Hey, what's up everybody? So the clip you just saw is some test footage that I've been working on today, setting up my green screen and just recording some sample footage to do some tests for this new short film that I want to work on, sort of taking my game idea and turning it into a short film and so it's very sci-fi based. So I wanted to try to, you know, test out some lights and see if I could do some acting against the green screen and see how that would work in Unreal Engine and then, you know, do the color grading and everything in DaVinci Resolve. So here's my current workflow for how I created that clip that you just saw. So here's my green screen setup in my room. It's pretty basic. I've just got a, you know, a stand and a cloth green screen set up pretty far behind my folding chair that I'm sitting in. I've got a little C-stand with a colored light, purple light in my face. I knew I was going to be like touching a screen or something like that, so I wanted some kind of a reflection off my face for that and so I went ahead and set that light up and then I just got a couple of just plain white lights back in the back for the green screen to light that up. Way too many wrinkles in this green screen so far. I need to steam that and get all of those out. It wasn't very easy to key, so I'll make all of this better, but this was just my test. So here's how I keyed this green screen video in DaVinci Resolve and exported it as an EXR file and imported that into Unreal Engine. Alright, so here's the footage that I recorded with my green screen and it's obviously very dull looking. I recorded this with the Log setting in my Blackmagic 4K camera so I could pull it into DaVinci and do some editing on it here. But as you can see I'm just kind of sitting there. I've got it zoomed in so that it's fairly close. I'm acting like I'm punching some buttons and kind of looking around, reaching up, just kind of doing some movement just so I can kind of see how this is going to look in Unreal Engine. So I did some basic color grading here on it just to kind of make it pop a little bit more. I really should have used more lights on myself with the green screen and I should have done more to cut out this rim light. I thought this was going to be a good idea and it doesn't look terrible but it does kind of make it difficult for the keying because I kind of have a green haze along the edge here. So lots more work to do on my green screen setup so that it makes it easier to chroma. For this I used the Fusion tab and I just set up a basic HSL keyer. I think that in 18.1 I could have used the 3D keyer. I'll experiment with that next and maybe do an update for this video if there's an easier process. This is just the way that I already kind of knew how to key the footage. I had to bump the gain and the contrast on it a little bit so I could separate myself from the screen a little bit better. So anyway, it's a good enough result for my test. So from here I went to the Deliver tab and I selected EXR for the format and I want to make sure this is checked the export alpha. This is what will make all of this black background into an alpha mask in Unreal Engine. And so that's pretty much it. So I just add it to my render queue and I render it out and it will, you know, based upon the location that you give it here, it's going to put a whole bunch of files. It's one file per frame basically for the EXR but it gives you lots of color data inside each one of those files that can be used in tools like DaVinci Resolve for, you know, more data when you're color grading or anything like that. So now that I've exported this we'll switch over to Unreal Engine and I'll show you how I pulled that in. So over in Unreal Engine 5.1 this is my current version of my project with my sequencer. Got a little bit of camera movement. These are all the things that you saw in the clip at the beginning minus the additional stuff I've done in DaVinci Resolve since then but I'll get into that in the next segment of this video. I'll talk about how I did the final color grading and some other things, sound design just to kind of make that clip that you saw at the very beginning. So at any rate, here is how you pull in the EXR file that you exported from DaVinci Resolve with your alpha mask from the previous step. So you create a new image media source. You right-click, you got your media and from here you can do your image media source. And for this one let's see my sequence path. You basically just have to go and just select the very first file of the EXR output. The EXR is a whole bunch of files of one per frame and just select the first one for this and it'll see everything else and it will automatically populate all the other things. You want to make sure that you're using 24 frames per second here for the most filmic quality possible. And so once you have that then it is in your content drawer and you can basically just drag it onto the screen. So I probably should do another video that's step-by-step of exactly how to do this. I think there's a couple out there already if you did a search for this. This is just sort of my project already in progress. So at any rate, let's jump back over here. Let's look at the default viewport and I'll show you kind of how this is laid out. So obviously everything is based on the camera view and there's nothing else other than what's going to be shown in the camera. And so let's see here. There's my green screen footage right there. And so this is just this media plate that you just drag onto there. It automatically pretty much sets everything for you. For me it already had the transparency. So let's see. Then I would drag it down and add it to the sequencer here so that it shows up and it's able to play. Everything else that I have here, all of these other assets are from KitBash3D. I think that this is from the Cyber District kit maybe or something. I don't know, I just kind of grabbed a few things just that looked kind of sci-fi looking that could kind of fill out the scene. So let's see. Switch back over to here. And see I've got my camera settings so that my green screen footages and focus everything else is sort of in the distance with the depth. I'm using a 50 millimeter prime here for that look. Let's see what else is special here. I think my exposure probably, I typically do this in a post-process volume. I think since this was just some test footage, I just did it directly on the camera. So let's see here. Where is the lens information? Here we go. This is it. So under exposure and lens you want to have this set to manual. And then you want to kind of adjust this out so that it looks kind of how you want it to be. So what was this before, 5.9 or something like that. Anyway, you can play around with some of this stuff. There are lots of effects here that you can add on to this. I typically do these things in DaVinci Resolve though. I like the quality of the effects a little bit better than the real time engine here. So another thing you'll notice here that I've added a bunch of lights. I've got a purple light in here. Let's see. There we go. There's all the game things. If you hit G on the keyboard by the way that will show or hide all of the game elements. And so I've got a purple light here and I've got a blue light here and a white light back here just to kind of fill all of this stuff out. This was the light that I have on my face and the green screen obviously. I kind of have my LED color light shining in my glasses there. That's kind of a no-no for filming but once again test footage. So you can see I've got all these things and then I've got this dust or smoke Niagara effect. It's okay. I just kind of needed a little bit more movement in there. But honestly like in situations like this it kind of pulls the green screen character out because it's at a hard time getting it to show in front of the green screen card. It shows behind it. And if I had added that to the footage that would look a little bit better but in this case it kind of you can see that separation and it doesn't look very good to me. So anyway once you build your scene here and another thing you can pick your angle like this is not the original angle that I filmed at. I've dropped the camera a little bit lower than it was when I originally filmed it. So you can kind of do whatever you want to do here. I think my next experiment like this I'm going to try a walking character and put them where they're kind of walking across the screen or something. So once you have everything lined up here the way that you want it you want to go to your movie render queue. You know you want to in my case I want to export as EXR again because I'm going to pull this into DaVinci Resolve. So I want to export as EXR sequence from Unreal Engine that gives me you know a file per frame but also more color data inside of each file. I want to use my anti-aliasing here. I want to use color output. I think that I could be doing some different configuration here that would make us a little bit better. I'm still learning about this but this is the way that I currently do it. All of this is you know work in progress as I expand up on my hobby and try to make better and better looking short films. So anyway have all of this render local. After that I have my folder full of EXR files and now I'm ready to pull them back into DaVinci Resolve and do a little bit of final color grading, a little bit of maybe video effect and some sound design. So let's get to that next. Alright so to wrap this up now we're back in DaVinci Resolve and this is my current basic test footage. I just did some very basic sound design here. I pulled in some sound effects that I had just locally on my NAS. I'm using this cinematic score for Blade Runner suspense whatever this is from. This is from a pack that I bought from Triune digital video. The Film Riot guys bought a big pack from them last Black Friday and had a bunch of royalty free cinematic scores that I just kind of use whenever I'm doing some test footage just to kind of give it a feel or something. So anyway I used that here. And so to bring the EXR clip in let's see let's go to the media tab here. You have to import media and you just go and you find the EXR files. This is where I had saved it from my green screen tests movie renders. You select the first one, you go all the way down to the end and you hold shift, you select the other one, you hit open and it will import that in. Now obviously I've already got it here so I won't do that again. But let's see where are we here. So I did something odd with the color configuration probably coming out of Unreal Engine and the footage came in really dark. But that was okay because it had plenty of color data in it so that I could adjust the mids and the highlights. But I'll figure more out how to make this better and make an updated video that shows what I've learned since then. So obviously this was fine it didn't really cause any issues. So let's see I've got an adjustment clip here I like to do this in my color grading projects for DaVinci Resolve. You add an adjustment clip on top of everything else and whatever you want to affect the entire video all of the clips all at once you just add to the adjustment clip. So like in this case I add most of my video effects or the film grain, film convert, nitro or whatever I'm using here for the film grain effect. I add all of those things to the adjustment clip so that they are automatically applied to all of the clips. And I've just got a little lower third here that just denotes this as test footage just so that everyone sees that I'm not really trying to pass this off as a production ready video. Anyway so the other interesting thing here maybe is the color tab like I said on the original I had to kind of crank the gamma and the gain a little bit for the clip and then I added some additional things to it this halation which is like the glow I typically don't use the bloom a lot in Unreal Engine and I try to add it here I believe there's also a bloom plug in but I've kind of been experimenting with this halation lately it's has a neat effect and you can limit it to just the highlights or anything else I've got a basic vignette here so just to kind of give it that rounded edge filmic look and I've added some very light film grain here because I knew that I was going to add more with film convert and I do all of that stuff on the adjustment clip here and so let's see I believe I have this set up let's see oh it's actually over in the edit tab. So if you go here and this is where I have film convert nitrate and you know I just I actually used the 4k setting here because that's what my green screen was but it made the Unreal Engine stuff look pretty decent too so I kind of like that setting I just kind of messed around with a few things here I'm not great at making this look very good yet but so I just kind of made a few settings adjustments just to kind of make it look decent anyway this is what we've got so obviously it pans out I've got a little bit of the sound design there I don't know maybe this is like a into the world devastation thing or something maybe and and this guy is doing something important I don't know what this is like I said test footage anyway thanks for watching this I hope it's been helpful if you learn something give it a like leave me a comment if you have questions about it if there's interest in doing a full maybe like a live stream or something where I do this this entire type of thing from start to end and you see the end every step and as opposed to me just coming in at the end and showing you my finished product let me know in the comments if that's something that you guys would like and I can make that happen anyway make sure you subscribe if you like this type of stuff I've got lots more of this coming so thanks for watching