Multiple Ways To Clone Yourself in Premiere Pro

Published on September 2, 2020

Video Effects

clone, cloning, greenscreen, Masking, premiere basics, ultrakey

How to clone yourself in adobe Premiere Pro

We all know Star Wars and it’s ginormous Clone armies. And I must admit, as a young kid I didn’t know how they created such an armies. Did they hire a thousand actors or did they shot one actor and copy pasted him a thousand times?

Of course when I grew up I soon realized how they did it and today I found two easy ways for you to do it yourself with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Masking

The first way is actually super simple, what we do is shoot from a tripod. We act our scene and then switch position to where your clone has to stand and act our scene from that point. Make sure that you don’t come in front of the part of the screen where you first stood. Then we just have to cut the clip, place them on top of each other and match the interaction of the clones and then we simple have to make a mask on the top layer and there we have our clones video.

Green screen

Our next method is using a green screen. Now when you’re shooting this there are some things that you have to think off. First of all make sure your green screen is evenly lit. You can do this with lights or you can go outside. Especially when it’s just a bit clouded. The light will be diffused and evenly lit without any harsh shadows. The next step is to make sure the green screen is tight. Either you take a large screen and attach it to some C-stands or you can go for a foldable and smaller green screen. Often times this has a border that automatically tightens the green screen. Once you’ve set up your green screen make sure that you keep enough distance. That way you won’t cast any shadows on it.

Once you’ve taken a couple of shots and acted as some of the clones step out of the frame. Then take away your green screen but keep the camera rolling. This way you have a clean plate of the background. We call this the empty shot.

Then we bring everything into Premiere Pro. We match everything and place it above each other with the empty clean plate on track number one. Then we are going to key out the green. We do this by placing a quick mask around ourselves to make the keying a bit easier. Then we apply the ultrakey effect.

First we select the green in our shot with the key color selector. Then we change the output to alpha channel, this way everything will become either black or white, the black parts are the parts that are going to be gone and white will be everything that remains. Then we’re going to play around with the highlight and shadow properties to make sure that our selection of the mask gets better. You have to end up with the subject being completely white and the background being completely black.

Then we’re going to refine it even more with the pedestal and transparency controls. To clean up the mask we’ll add just a tiny bit of choke. And to feather it we soften it a bit. Of course don’t forget to end it by setting the output back to composite. You can then copy and paste the ultrakey effect on to the other green screen shots.

top Green screen tip

My colleague Yannick gave me a super handy tip for keying your green screen! If the selection of your green is a bit hard to pull off you can use the lumetri color panel to enhance it. With the HSL Secondary tab you can select the green. Once that’s done you can blur it a bit and pump up the saturation and green tint. Also lower the contrast. This will make the green in your shot pop and your keying will go a lot easier.

Skillshare

If you want to learn even more editing techniques in Adobe Premiere Pro or even in Adobe After Effects have a look at our Skillshare classes. We cover all the basics like color grading, masking and so much more. It’s the ideal way to learn a ton about film making and editing and it’s super cheap. Heck, the first two months are even completely free! So definitely worth it.