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Green Screen Keying question
I have greenscreen footage captured on beta. Because I don’t have a capture card on my computer, I am bringing in the footage by connecting the beta deck componant into the DVCAM deck, and then capturing the footage into the computer through firewire (I have SDI deck control to the beta deck).
Here’s my question: does my beautifully lit, well shot beta cam footage loose its keying quality by passing through the DVCAM deck/ Firewire compression? If so, by how much?
Thanks!
Justin
FCP 4.5, G4 -
2 Replies
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Yes, it loses a lot.
Is there anywhere else you can go to get this captured and put on a hard drive? It’s certainly possible to key DV footage (we do it here all the time) but it’s a lot harder and takes a lot more work. You have to do a lot more “clean-up” in problem areas working frame to frame.
There’s some of that kind of work in all keying but you’ll be doing more of it with DV compression.
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The difference is two-fold: A loss of colour information via compression (which makes accurate keying muchgmore difficult) and a loss of picture detail via compression. Your system loses the ability to accurately identify exactly the areas that are tricky to key. It’s really a big difference – the difference between a nice key and a tacky one IMHO.
I would really consider purchasing a cheap capture card, such as the $300 blackmagic card. You have a Digibeta deck (assume you meant Digibeta rather than Beta SP with SDI out, which we have but are rarer) which costs that much a couple of days to hire, and a DVCAM deck you don’t even need here. If you have spent the time and money to shoot at Beta quality, don’t cheat on this in post – especially with CK. There are, of course, better quality DV codecs you could use here, but why bother
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