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Chroma Key That Fuzzy Hair!
Hi,
I’m trying to do some chroma key shot of a female subject with fuzzy hair using the tools available with FCP Studio 2.
Could someone give me a few tips on how to deal with the hair?
I’m pulling a good key everywhere except the curls of her hair.
Any suggestion would be appreciated.
Thanks.Kevin Jones
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9 Replies
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First question before we can offer much help: With what format have you shot your material?
If you shot conventional DV, your options are slim and none.
We see the topic of chromakeying often so you could spend a few hours cruising the forum archives using search.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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I would open in Motion and key using Primatte RT. For a start.
Phil
Just like you remember it…
maybe better. -
Ditto Primatte, also use the feature in that same collection in Motion (if you have it) that adds in spill killing correction to the edges. It will add magenta to edges on green screen and yellow to blue screen, to kill spill. Don’t overdo it.
Use garbage mattes so you don’t have to worry about a clean key wall to wall but just around the body and hair.
A trick I have done before on short 30 second spots with troublesome footage is to pull the keys using photoshop. Export>quicktime conversion> sequential stills> targa format to a folder. Open the folder in photoshop, under the tools for the magic wand and selection, use selection by color. You generally only need to do this to the first frame in the stack. If you record the actions and save the action, you can apply that to the entire folder automatically and get something pretty amazing back in minutes. Re-import the stills to your timeline, back in business. Targas contain alpha channel info, at least in 8-bit, you can leave the alpha blank or fill the cut-out with a better overall chromakey color and then do the keying in FCP again… or whatever.
(addendum-dum: you can get in trouble importing the stack of stills two ways: by not using leading zeros, i.e. frame 0001, frame0002, etc, which can put some frames out of order, and by forgetting to set the preference in your import dialogs to a duration of just one frame per still you import.)
Something that happened to me once: We found it impossible to blue screen a lady with blonde hair one time. Asked her if she’d just shampooed and what brand. Some brands add a bluing agent to the soap, it turns out.
Unless specifically using Ultimatte, next time you shoot, use a real gelled backlight on the set to help kill spill contamination and I bet the key will work easier even in DV’s 4:1:1 color space.
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Nice stuff, Mark.
After ten years, I still loathe and despise Photoshop with a totally unreasonable passion.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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DVmatte Pro 3 does an amazing job on DV footage.
Have a wonderful day.
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This helped a bit…
I zoomed-in on the Canvas to 800% and resampled her fringe hair with the Chroma-Key dropper. At this scale I was able to sample colors on a pixel level.
Looks better.
Thanks for the help.kj
2.5GHz Quad-core PowerPC G5
Final Cut Studio 2 -
Shot with XDCAM EX. 1080i.
kj
2.5GHz Quad-core PowerPC G5
Final Cut Studio 2 -
One of the tricks that have helped me in the past is to take the DV (might even work with HDV) footage, and export it as Quicktime Uncompressed Blackmagic RGB. Or you could also use Animation.
Then import that back and key that. You can place this in a new sequence with the same codec and with Always render in RGB on. That makes the colour space ‘expand’. Especially useful with fine detail against a solid color background.
Neil
FCP Editor, Mumbai, India.
Completely PAL. -
I have found recently that just about any keying difficulty
can be overcome quite easily and completely within final cut pro with
Primatte.
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