Green Screen / Black and White

Rob-Leischner wrote on 7/23/2025, 5:46 AM

My understanding is that I can chroma key the green screen behind a subject and then add black and white to everything. Is there a way to make everything black and white except what's being displayed on the green screen? It would be wonderful if I could keep that in color. Hope that makes sense. Thanks for any help.

Comments

Gid wrote on 7/23/2025, 6:17 AM

@Rob-Leischner Hi, there's prob a few ways of doing that, but if you add a colour corrector to the event to make it B/W it will affect the chromakey unless you start including masks..

You could chromakey out the green & then render as ProRes with alpha, then reimport that ProRes, but that is fixed, ie. you can't easily adjust the chromakey without rendering the clip again.

You could Nest the green screen event & add chromakey to that nest (pic below)

Back on the main timeline the event will show with an alpha background & any fx can then be added, here I reduced the saturation with Colour Corrector. (the green screen clip isn't 16:9 that's why it has black bars down the side)

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PS. adding a couple of Bezier masks removes the black bars.

Or a single Pan/Crop mask.

Rob-Leischner wrote on 7/23/2025, 7:21 AM

Thanks, Gid! It's good to hear that it's possible, though I will admit I don't know anything about nests. Is that difficult to do?

Gid wrote on 7/23/2025, 7:37 AM

@Rob-Leischner Hi, no not hard.

Save your project. (this is important because if you don't, when you go through the nesting process you get a window asking you to Save the project, this can get confusing so saving first before nesting alleviates this)
Then highlight your green screen clip & this button will become available.
The screen will show a Save window, rename it whatever yoy want, then a 'Rendering' window & the event will then show on the timeline, do whatever you want to it.
When you've done click the button at the bottom to return to the main window.

Rob-Leischner wrote on 7/23/2025, 7:46 AM

Awesome, thanks! Just for clarification: when I save the highlighted clip, you mentioned a rending window, do I render the clip then to complete the nesting process, or wait until I render the entire video?

Gid wrote on 7/23/2025, 8:00 AM

@Rob-Leischner No, no need to render, the window that shows is just Vegas going through it's process.

Save your project.
Click your clip so it's highlighted in yellow.
Click the nest button at the bottom.
When the window pops up save the nest.
Do your chromakey on the nested timeline.
Click the button at the bottom to return to the main timeline.

Rob-Leischner wrote on 7/23/2025, 9:26 AM

Thanks so much for taking the time to help! I'll start working on it.