Video Transcript
Unreal 5.7 NEW Composure Tutorial, Part 1 Basic Chroma Key
Greg Corson · 6,631 views 11 Dec 2025 #unrealengine #virtualproduction · Duration 34:09 · youtu.be/Nz5pY1PsIe0
Unreal 5.7 introduces a new compositing system. This has a TON of new features we've been wanting for a long time including a better chroma keyer, easier to use compositing setup and the ability to handle shadows! In this tutorial I cover setting up video in/out and a basic green screen composite. In Unreal 5.7 this process is completely different (and much simpler) than it was in earlier versions so I wanted to do a tutorial for it first. 00:00 Intro to new Composure in 5.7 01:00 Create the project/new startup screen 02:34 Required Plugins 03:56 Setup Blackmagic Video Input 07:50 Setup Composure Composite (all new!) 09:50 Setup chroma key layer 19:25 Output and record the final video. 20:36
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Unreal 5.7 is here with a lot of improvements for virtual production users. The biggest new feature is a hugely improved new chroma gear. You can see in this sample that it has no problem at all with fine details like this piece of string or this fuzzy stuffed animal. It handles the animals fur and even fine details like the whiskers without any rough edges. The new keyer is actually a color difference keyer or delta keyer which brings a whole lot of new options including catching shadows from your live talent feed or from CG objects. Hi everyone, I'm Greg Corson and this series of tutorials is about how to set up and use the new composure compositing system. Because this new system has so many options, I'm breaking it up into a lot of smaller tutorials. This first one is
basic and will cover setting up live video input, a chroma key layer, and video output. So, here we are in the Epic Launcher. First thing you should do is look up here in the top and make sure you have 5.7.0. If you don't, or if this says preview, you want to make sure you do an update to the full final 5.7.0 because some of the features and menus have changed a little bit. So once you've got the latest release of 5.7.0, just press the launch button. If this is the first time you're using it, it might take a few minutes to compile and set up everything, but after that, it should come up pretty quickly, just like you saw here. Now, this is the new entry screen for Unreal, and you can see it's quite a bit
different than what you're used to. Uh, they've added a section here for projects. They've also added latest news, community highlights, and all this stuff that you used to get exclusively through the Epic Launcher. Uh, it's now right here whenever you start up Unreal this way. And if you're wondering where the templates went, you go up to here and say new project. And now you get the template screen we're all used to. Now, this tutorial could be done with an existing virtual production project that you happen to have laying around, but it's a lot easier if we start out with a template. That'll make sure everything is correctly initialized. So, I'm going to go to film and video and I'm going to
choose virtual production and I'm going to call my project tutorial 1 and then press the create button and Unreal will create the project for me. This can take a minute or two. So now uh the project is created and we're in the Unreal editor and I'm just going to use this default background. Even though it's not very interesting, it'll make sure everyone has exactly the same thing as I've got when they're doing this tutorial. So first thing you need to do is go to edit and choose plugins. Now, a lot of this stuff will be set correctly if you use the template for virtual production, but just in case you didn't, I'm going to show you some things that need to be set. First, you can type composure here in the search box. And you'll see there's two entries. There's composure experimental and
legacy composure. Uh if you've been using composure before, legacy composure will probably be checked here. Uh if you've loaded the template, it'll have the experimental one checked. And for this tutorial, you want to turn off the legacy composer and make sure composure here is checked. Another thing that I'm going to turn on, which isn't on by default, is the time data monitor. Uh we're not going to use this too much in this tutorial, but it's a handy thing to have. So I'm going to turn it on anyway. And now it's going to ask me, it's going to tell me that I need to restart the Unreal editor for these changes. So, just go ahead and hit the restart now button and it'll do it for you. Now that we're back in the editor, the first thing I want to do is set up my camera
video input. Now, I have a Blackmagic 8K Pro G2 card. There are other cards that work just fine. Most of the ones from Blackmagic or AJ also work. And you can even use USB input, although the setup for USB is a little different. If you want to use USB, please let me know and I'll do a video addendum that covers in more detail how to set it up. For the moment, I'll just show you how my Blackmagic card is set up. If you look in the description to this video, you'll you'll see a link to professional video IO with Unreal. If you want more information on how all this is works and what the various settings are, you can always go to that and read through it. So, the first thing I want to do is I'll go down to the content drawer and I'm
going to make a folder for my Blackmagic card. I've called it Blackmagic video. You can call it anything you like. It doesn't matter. Then I go inside that folder, right click, and then I come down here to media, and I get a media bundle. And I'm going to call that Blackmagic one because it's the number one input on my Blackmagic card that I'm using for the camera. And you'll see it creates this little inner assets file here along with it. Uh on some setups you might get a popup asking you if you want to create them. And if you do get that popup, say yes. Now doubleclick on the Blackmagic one thing that you just created. And you'll get a
screen like this one. This is how you set up which input you're going to use and some other things. So the first thing is media source. I come up here and I select blackmagic media source. Then I expand this next blackmagic menu. And you'll see under configuration it probably says nothing. You come in here and you can use auto and just hit apply and it should find things. But just in case, I usually choose manual. This is useful if you have more than one thing connected to your DeckLink card. Uh, this makes sure that you get the right thing. So, I'm going to turn off auto and my camera is 4K UHD [snorts]
progressive at 29.97. And I'll apply that. And I'm going to expand this a bit. And you'll see that mine is set to 8 bit. I'm going to turn it to 10 because my camera is a 10- bit camera. [snorts] Um, I'm also going to tell it that I want the input source to be sRGB. I'll get into that a little bit more later on, but for most people, that's what you're going to select. Everything else here, the default should be fine. So, I'm going to click the little save button to save the asset, and I'm going to close it. To activate your input and keep it running, all you have to do is go down here to the content drawer, take the Blackmagic one asset that you
made, and drag it out into the world. And you can see there I have some live video running. I'll wave my hand in front of the camera to prove it. If you want a better view of this, you can also go into the content drawer, go to the inner assets, and click on the T Blackmagic asset here, and that'll give you a full screen view. As you can see, I'm going to close that away. You have to have one of these resources in your scene somewhere or the video won't keep running. There may be a better way than this uh to deal with it, but for the moment, I just create one and then I shove it out of the way down here under the floor where you can't see it. Now, we're going to set up the new composure. There's quite a lot of
differences between this and the old one. So, watch closely. We start by going up to the Windows area and then down to virtual production and selecting composure. Now, you'll see over here in my doc, I've got a new tab for composure. This might pop up as a separate window or someplace else if you can go ahead and put it wherever you want on a second screen. Dock it here like I've got it. Uh anything you like. Then you click place composite actor. This is a new thing that you need to have. So go ahead and click it. And you can see it appear here in the screen. And you'll also need to create a cine camera. So, let's go up here into the create button and go to cinematic and choose city camera actor. Now, I'm going to move the city camera actor a bit to give it a more appropriate view. I'm
just going to pull it back further away from the stage here here so we can see the whole thing. The next thing you want to do is set up your camera parameters. Now, this can get kind of complicated. If you've watched other virtual production tutorials, you've probably heard about things like lens calibration and things like that. I'm going to skip over that part because this tutorial is just about the basic green screen operation. So technically, you don't have to set up the camera parameters at all for that. But it at least putting in basic information about your camera can make things look a little more realistic. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. So I've still got city camera actor selected. I'm going to come down and hit the current camera settings and I'm going to change them to match my camera. My camera happens to be a 16x9
DSLR. It's got a focal length of 16 to 35 mm. And that's really all that I'm going to set up this time around other than making sure my current focal length is at 35 mm, which is how my lens is currently set. Now we can start setting up composure for a basic chroma key. So I'll go up here to the composure tab. We created this previously. And you can see we have the composite actor, the main render layer, the shadow reflection layer, and the plate layer. We're not going to use the shadow reflection layer this time. And since we want the video to basically be in front of everything else, I'm going to click on the plate layer and drag it up so
that it's at the top. And you can see my screen changes to color bars because the plate layer hasn't been set up. The first thing we do here is we get the texture from our camera. And that's T Blackmagic 1. And now you can see on the screen is a video coming out of my camera and it's live. Now on this plate there actually are quite a few different settings you can play with. If you've done work with composure before, you know that you used to have to set up a special material to manage how the different layers of your composite went together. Well, now you don't have to do that. Now you have this operation and you can see right now it's
set to over Uh it has there are a lot of other different options here. I'm not going to use any of them this time, but uh there's also a composite mesh content which is used for other things. And down here you see the various pass names. I'm going to select media passes. Then I'm going to hit the little plus button and I'm going to do a color keyer pass. You can see the screen changed a little bit. That's because it's we've now got a key and it's already partially configured. You can see it's set to type green. You can choose red, green, or blue screens, but green is generally what people use. Here you have the key color, which is right now set to pure green. I may change that in a minute. Uh
you'll notice here there's also a thing called clean plate. I'm not going to use that this time, but basically it lets you take a picture of your empty stage and use that to make the key work better. Unfortunately, this only works if the camera doesn't move. There are some waitings for red, green, and blue, alpha threshold, despilling, devignetting, and some stuff regarding how the key is visualized and denoised. Probably the most important thing to set up is the actual color of your green screen. the screen that you have is probably not exactly a nice saturated green. So, it's important to get the color right. The easiest way I found to do that is I turn off the key for a moment. Then I double click on the key
color and I hit the eyropper. Then I can move the eyropper around to some place near the center of the screen like this. And you can see over on the color picker that the green I'm pointing at is nowhere near as saturated as the the green that was originally here. So I'll click on that and then I'll turn the keyer back on. And you can already see the background is much brighter than it was. That's because the key is the correct color. Now, another thing that you probably want to do is to click somewhere like up in the sky here so that nothing is selected. And if you see these like the arrows and these little icons and such, you probably want to press G
to turn them all off because it can make it difficult to adjust the key. Moving down on the uh chroma key settings, you can see we have a place for a clean plate. This is where you can provide an actual uh shot of the empty stage and the key will run off the differences of that. That can be really helpful in getting a nice clean key. The only problem is it not going to work if your camera is going to be moving. The red, green, and blue weights here can be used to offset certain uh colors, but I'm going to leave that the way it is. Now, let's get into the fun part, getting the actual key values right. You could adjust it based on this screen, but it's hard to tell exactly what's working and what
isn't that way. So, I'm going to come down to visualization and change that to alpha. And this is showing me the actual alpha channel. Um, and in a good key, you'd have all the green screen be black and everything else be pure white. So, I need to do some adjustments to get it into shape. The first thing I'm going to do is go to alpha threshold and I'm going to bring down the top a bit until all the things that I want to be keyed are pure white. and don't have anything showing through. You can see that's what I got right now. Then I'm going to bring
up the bottom to see if I can make all the green screen area turn completely black. And you can see I have to bring it up pretty high. So that's a bit of a problem. That's because my screen isn't completely evenly lit. You can really see that in this shot that it's better lit up at the top than it is at the bottom. I can fix that to some extent using the vignetter. This sort of compensates for a situation where the corners of the of the picture are a little darker or a little brighter than the rest. So, I'm going to bring that up to about maybe 0.5 for now.
Now, if I go back to the alpha threshold, I should have a lot easier time getting the entire green screen to go black. And you can see that there it is. I'm going to adjust the the top end here a little bit more to get some of this area around the edges of the the cat to be more dark. And right now, I've got a fairly decent key, I would say. So, I'll switch back to key visualization. And now you can see that this key looks pretty decent. Some of the key things about this that you wouldn't have seen in the old Unreal Chroma keyer is since this cat is kind of fuzzy around the
edges and he has little whiskers sticking out. Let me see if I can make that a little more visible. I'll just move things so you can see them against a darker background. So you can see his whiskers are being keyed without any jaggies or or fuzziness around them. And the edges of him, which are really fuzzy fur, also look nice and smooth with no obvious jagged edges. So that's the advantage of having a color difference gear. The disadvantage, as I said, is your green screen has to be very well lit and nice and even. And unfortunately, in my small studio, it's really difficult for me to get things just right. You may have better luck in
your own studio. Let me give you a couple of tips on how to evaluate your green screen. I'll start by turning the heater off. And I think one thing you can see here that's pretty obvious is the top of my screen is lit more brightly than the bottom. And that's causing most of the problems that I'm having right now and the need to have the alpha thresholds set at such extreme values. So the most important thing here would be to go back and move the lights around and get this screen pretty uniform. And one thing that can help you do that is if you switch the key visualization to alpha and turn the keyer back on, you'll see if I drop the D vignette
strength down, it's pretty clear what parts of the screen are too dark and what parts are too bright. So hopefully in my next tutorial, I'll have figured out a way to get my screen lit more evenly and we won't have this issue anymore. But for now, I want to get on with how you set everything up to do a key. So, here's what the key looks like right now. I'll just switch it back into key mode. One thing about the new composure is it seems to apply the uh stack of plates to whatever camera is currently being visualized. So, right now, what you're seeing is composure applied to the editor's view camera. Now, if I go back to the outliner here and select my cine camera actor, you can see the viewpoint here is a
little bit different. So now I have a typical key like you'd see on say a TV news show where the camera is stationary and we have a green screen where the talent in this case the checkerboard and the little cat show through and everything in behind comes from Unreal's 3D renderer. So the next thing we need to know is how do we get this out? As usual with questions like that the answer is really it depends. It depends on what hardware you have, what level of quality you want, and how quickly you'd like to get things done. Probably the simplest method that'll work for everyone because it doesn't require any extra hardware is to just render your video to a window and then use some kind
of screen recorder software to record it or directly stream it to the internet. I generally use OBS for this. That's open broadcasting software. But you can also use just about any kind of screen recorder. The other alternative if you happen to have a DeckLink or Aza card is that you can send the output directly to that card, have it come out one of the cards video connectors and then record that on an external recorder or directly broadcast it through a TV station or some kind of streaming device. I'll start by showing you how to render your composite to a window since that's the method a lot of people will use. And after that, I'll show you how you set up a deck link. The first thing you need to do is set up Unreal so it'll render the correct camera when you hit play. The easiest way to do that is with a level
blueprint. So you can come here and go down to open level blueprint and you get this. I don't know if you've done a blueprint before, but it's pretty simple. I can come over here and turn off context sensitivity. Then I type in set view target with blend and select it. And I connect this to the begin play so that it'll run when I hit play. And I say get player controller. And I connect that up to the target. And I need to come back here and select my cine camera actor. And now I can create a reference to that in this blueprint and connect that up as
well and hit compile and save. And that should be ready to go now. And I can close it. So to show you what this does, you can see that the camera that's being rendered in the main viewport isn't quite the same view as the camera that's being rendered by the cine camera actor. So now when I press play with that extra blueprint, it's going to select the cine camera actor and give me exactly what I want. However, you don't really want to record the editor window because it can vary in size, aspect ratio, and resolution. What you want to do is create what's called a pi window. You can see new editor window pi up here because that one allows you to control
the size and resolution. So what I'm going to do is tell go to advanced settings here and I'm going to select a common resolution of 720p. Most of you will probably want to use 1080p, but I'm going to use 720 so it fits on the screen here and makes it easy for you to see what I'm doing. So now all I have to do is choose that I want to play in a PI window. And now my output comes out in this window in real time. You probably notice these little circles down here. I'm not sure why Unreal has made this a default, but those are what you would be using for joysticks in a mobile game. They're pretty easy to get rid of. Just go up here to edit project settings and type touch interface in the search box.
and you'll see this thing for mobile games that says always show touch interface. Just uncheck that. Close it back up. And now when you run, you won't see those circles anymore. So now you've got a window that you can record with OBS or with any other kind of screen recorder. One thing you do want to do to improve the quality of your recordings and to avoid overloading your computer is to control the frame rate. If I go here to virtual production time data monitor, you can see here that I'm running 120 frames per second right now and that the timing is jittering up and down like you see this bar. That's really not good because it means that it's pushing my graphics card as hard as it can and also my computer.
So, this could lead to skips or tearing or other problems in your output video. The best way to fix that is to come up here to project settings and you can type in frame rate. And you'll see in this frame rate section there's a box for use a fixed frame rate. You can set this to whatever frame rate you'd like. This could be 24 for film, 30 for YouTube, or even 60 if uh you want a much smoother frame rate. The higher you set it, the more compute and GPU you're going to use. So, I'll close this up. And now you can see I'm locked in at 30
hertz and I've got plenty of free time. If you're using a professional video card like a deck link or a card, you probably want to do this a little bit differently. And I'll show you how that works. First, let me go back and turn off that setting I just set. Okay. Now I'm going to open the content browser. And you remember I made this Blackmagic video folder. I'll go in there and I rightclick, select blueprint class.
Open up the all classes box. Then I search for custom time step. And since I'm using a Blackmagic card, I choose the Blackmagic custom time step. You select that and create it. And then you want to name it. Now you open that up. In the configuration window, you want this to be configured the same way you configured your camera. For me, that's 4K UHD progressive, and it's running at 29.97.
Compile that. Then I can close it. Let's save everything just to make sure. Now, if I go back to the time data monitor screen, you can see we're still running at 120 hertz. Just to make this simpler to to see, I'm going to close that up. go up here and turn on the viewport stats to show frames per second. And you can see clearly here it's still buzzing along at 120. Now I come back to project settings.
Go back down to engine general settings again. Scroll down. open up the advanced section under frame rate and you'll see custom time step. So now I select my Blackmagic time step one which I just made. Close this back up and you'll see that everything is locked together. Now I'm running the exact frame rate of my camera. This is nice because it means that Unreal will generate exactly one 3D image for every video image that comes in from my camera. That avoids any kind of streaking or tearing or other
problems and keeps everything in perfect sync. Like I said, you can't do this unless you have a Blackmagic or a card, but if you do, it's definitely something that you want to set up. Now I'll show you how to output your video directly to a Blackmagic card. If you happen to have an Aza card, it works pretty much the same way. So go back down to your content drawer and into the Blackmagic video area that you created earlier. Then you want to rightclick, go to media, select Blackmagic Media Output. And I'll call that blackmagic output
and double click to open it up. Now you need to configure everything. And I'm doing output full device tech link 8K Pro channel one single link 1080 progressive 29.97 and I'm allowing it to freeun because I don't have an external sync generator. And I'm also going to set the pixel format to 10 bit. And that's really all you need to do right now. Save it. Close it. Now go up to window virtual production media capture. And
you should get a window that looks a lot like this. Expand media viewport capture and hit plus to add a capture. Then under cameras, hit plus to add a camera. Under this, you want to select your city camera actor and the Blackmagic output that you just created. And you should see the red capture button enabled. If you don't, check to make sure that you don't have more than one capture or one set up in here because if you have a capture set up that isn't fully configured, it won't let you press the red button.
So now all I have to do is press the button and down here's a preview of what it's sending out to my Blackmagic card which I can now record on an external recorder or send directly into some other video system like a TV studio for example. So, that's the basics of setting up video input, the new composure in Unreal 5.7, and setting up video output in a couple of different ways. I mentioned earlier that the new key in composure is a color difference key. This means it works on the color difference between the green screen color you've set and what's coming in through the camera. any departure from the color that you've set will come up
as more or less transparency in the key. This is why the color difference key works so much better for hair and other fine details. But it also means that the quality of the key is very dependent on how smoothly and cleanly your green screen is lit. So the first tip is to make sure your green screen is as evenly lit as you can make it without any wrinkles in it. Using heavier weight cloth can make it easier to avoid wrinkles. Or you can just attach clamps to the edges of your screen and pull it tight with rubber bands or cords. You also want a green screen material that is as saturated a green color as possible. A lot of the cheaper materials that you get are not very brightly saturated. Professional green screens tend to be almost fluorescent looking and work much better, although they cost
more. Some people have had success with backlit green screens that can provide a very saturated color. You can also use RGB lighting to throw green light on your screen to make it a brighter green, but you have to be very careful with both of these setups to make sure that you're not casting green light on your talent. It also helps a lot to light your talent and your green screen separately and to keep the talent some distance away from the screen as much as you can manage. In an ideal setup, the talent lighting will cast almost no light on the green screen and the green screen lights will cast almost no light on the talent. And finally, you want to avoid a lighting setup where the talent will cast shadows on the green screen because these will show up in your key.
Now, if you actually want this talent to cast some shadows, say for example, on a green screen floor, you can do that. And those shadows that are cast on the green floor will come through as shadows in the final key, which can be really nice to add realism. I'm going to stop this tutorial here because, as you've probably guessed, the new composure has a ton of new things in it and a lot of different options, and I don't want this tutorial to get incredibly long. So, I'll cover a lot of that stuff in additional tutorials that will come later. I'm going to try changing the way I do tutorials. And instead of doing gigantic long ones, I'm going to try to keep them short and focused on a single topic. This one is just the basics of setting
up a chroma key and video in and out. I hope you find this useful. Please like, comment, and subscribe, even if it's just to let me know where you're watching from. It always helps with the YouTube algorithm if uh people do that. So, this is Greg Corson, and I'll see you next time.
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