• Adobe After Effects

  Best keyer…

  Posted by Brad Baker on October 31, 2006 at 6:15 pm

  I have a project coming up where I will be editing/keying about 15 to 20 hrs of footage. I have access to an Avid, FCP and of course AFX.

  I’ve been through Aaron’s tutorial on super-tight junk mattes, and it seems like I should be able to get them looking good using AFX. I’m thinking I will edit my selects in FCP and then move over to AFX for the key work. Final output will be Flash, if that matters.

  I don’t have a lot of experience on the Avid which is why I’m choosing FCP. Any thoughts on which program has the best keyer?

  All help appreciated.

  Thanks.

  Erik Pontius replied 19 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Andrew Shanks

  October 31, 2006 at 10:15 pm

  Hi Brad,
  keylight in AE is streets better than any of the keyers that come as standard with FCP or Avid, so your initial instincts would be correct (use the edit application you are most comfortable with, export a quicktime REFERENCE sequence from there (so you’re not recompressing the footage, it is linking to the captured source footage for max quality), do the keying in AE, render from there, edit back into your finished programme (if necesary) or convert straight to Flash.

  Having said that, if the green/blue screens have been lit well, and your flash animated sequences are being scaled down in size in the final output, you might actually be able to get away with just pulling keys within your keyer. I’d be inclined to do a test on one clip using the editors keyer, output it to a flash file of the final dimensions, and see if it will do.
  Just for the sake of saving you a step having to go into AE (and thus saving time).

  Goodluck,

  andrew

  🙂
• 

  Brad Baker

  October 31, 2006 at 10:50 pm

  Thanks so much for your help Andrew! I’ll let you know how it turns out.

  Brad
• 

  Erik Pontius

  October 31, 2006 at 11:17 pm

  I did a similiar project recently. I captured and cut all my selects on Avid Xpress Pro, exported the clips and keyed using AE and Keylight. The green screen the actor was shot against wasn’t the best and I had hundred or so clips to do. With Keylight I was able to set up the settings after finding the right combination and then save it as an preset. I was then able to just drop the preset on the clips and adjust a little if needed.
  In my case, the clips were going to be incorporated into a larger flash piece as a kind of avatar, so I exported the clips directly from AE using the Flash 8 Flix exporter from On2 Technologies. Flash 8 supports an alpha channel and the On2 flix exporter has option to include the alpha.

  Erik

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up