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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Keyed actor becomes transparent

  • Keyed actor becomes transparent

    Posted by Dan Yadin on April 27, 2010 at 7:13 pm

    I’ve used color key and keylight to rotoscope my actor in front of a blue screen. When I lay that footage over a second video, you can see right through my actor’s shirt to the video behind him.

    How do I make my actor opaque again?

    Illya Laney replied 16 years ago 5 Members · 5 Replies
  • 5 Replies
  • Paul Conigliaro

    April 27, 2010 at 9:01 pm

    I’m with Dave. It’s difficult to help without more info. A couple things:

    Are you using BOTH color key and Keylight to pull your key? If so, that could be one problem right there. Use just one.

    Secondly, it sounds like your actor’s shirt is close in color to your screen. I’ve dealt with this a lot on retail shoots where the talent is wearing teal on a green screen. It takes some experimentation and possibly some tedious rotoscoping.

    Would you be able to post images of your raw footage and your resulting key?

    conigs
    [Disclaimer: Sometimes I am an idiot and misinterpret people’s posts. I’m sorry.]

  • Dan Yadin

    April 27, 2010 at 9:36 pm

    Yes, I am using both. The color key does most of the work, then I use keylight on a simple choker matte. I’m pretty much ripping everything off of the keying method in video co-pilot’s advanced car hit: https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/advanced_car_hit/

    Here is my before shot: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29537088@N00/4558342075/

    And here’s my after: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29537088@N00/4558342081/

    You’re right about his shirt being similar to the background, I’m just not sure what else I can do.

    Thanks for your time.
    -Dan

  • Craig Whitaker

    April 28, 2010 at 2:50 am

    I’m going to have to refer to one of Daves stock answers….can you reshoot? This time making the screen brighter so it’s not the same luminance as his shirt? If not? I can only think to animate a holdout matte to focus on his core or just roto the whole damn thing….or cs5’s rotobrush 🙂

    Craig Whitaker
    VFX Student
    New York University
    http://www.craigwhitaker.net

  • Tudor “ted” jelescu

    April 28, 2010 at 7:13 am

    It seems that you have a lot of blue on the shirt, but the edges are ok. You could try to see if a garbage matte works to bring the shirt back in.

    Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
    Senior VFX Artist
    Bucharest, Romania
    http://www.ennstudio.ro

  • Illya Laney

    April 28, 2010 at 8:38 am

    I just messed around with your shot for a second and got a pretty good luma key from his shirt. To do this right I’d suggest doing separate keys. Mask out different sections of his body precompose each key then combine them all later. Using a luma key with Keylight should work pretty well, but if you have Primatte, that will work better than Keylight for something with this much spill.

    Motion Design, Color, Editing
    Simulated Wood Grain Cabinet Inc.
    (Seriously though, that’s the name on the paycheck)

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