-
Ulltimatte vs FCP chroma key?
I am considering buying Ulltimatte. Is it worth the money? What does it do that FCP does not? Thoughts?
-
7 Replies
-
FCP is fine if the lighting is perfect and you don’t really care about making it perfectly seamless. (Or if you don’t mind it looking like the “Unpainted Arizona” commercial in “Raising Arizona”)
Ultimatte is a professional tool that can deal with things like hair and lighting issues, and can, in the right hands yield a seamless, believable composite with a background.
-
Other excellent keyers are from Primatte (Motion has a cut-down version which is still pretty good), Keylight (which comes with AfterFX) but now has a version that works inside FCP, and PHYX
John
MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.1, Motion 4.0.1, Comp 3.5.1, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.1)Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN
-
I tested all the main keying software (Primatte, Ultimatte, Zmatte, etc) for my company and decided to go with Ultimatte.
Ultimatte has some definite advantages over the FCP Chroma keyer, namely in hair and edging. In the hair you are easily and quickly able to achieve definition in someone’s hair without the noise and wierdness you sometimes get using the FCP Chroma key (especially dealing with the uncontrollable metal-hair I was looking at). Also in situations where the lighting wasnt that good the results you get with Ultimatte are pretty impressive.
Another plus over the other keying programs (at least at the time when i tested them, June 09) Ultimatte takes advantage of all your processors so render time is kept to a minimum (of course there are other factors that play into render time- codec, other filters, etc).
So long story short, I think you will be very impressed by the results you get with Ulitmatte, but I would download and play with the demo version to make sure you like it.
-Dave
LTM -
If you haven’t downloaded the demo yet, you may want to.
We prepared a package recently for a client that required a lot of green screen shots. We were impressed with Ultimatte as a whole, but we certainly ran into this issue (quoted from their release notes):
“Auxiliary inputs (such as the Background and Clean Plate) may fail to load in FCP 6.”
We had problems getting the plug in to recognize the background plate, which is rather important (try it out in the demo to see if it works for you). If you do buy the plug in, you may want to contact them first to see if this issue has been resolved.
I’m assuming you are talking about Ultimatte AdvantEdge 1.6.4
-
We have the Diamond keyer in Combustion2, FCP/Motion version of Primattte and Ultimatte AdvantEdge, which we got because at the time we bought it, it was best rated in dealing with chromakeying 4:1:1 DV25 footage in particular, and we get a lot of that here.
The other editors here are scared of Ultimatte, and never touch it. One of them is convinced the copy protection dongle for it is the cause for every problem he’s ever had with FCP on his workstation, so he pulls it out. In the name of science, I secretly put the dongle on the spaer port in the back of the tower, hidden by the racks, and he unknowingly used FCP without incident for a week or so that way until I pointed out that he’d been working with the dongle plugged in all that time and no issues.
So, logically, he uninstalled Ultimatte the next day.
Some folks don’t appreciate science, and prefer to trust voodoo.
That said, I try the FCP keyer first and surprisingly, have almost never had a problem. Then again, I light it right, to start with.
I save ultimatte for the really hard problems.
-
With the tools we already have in FCS, buying anything else is a waist of money.
The standard CK in FC works in 10b; is VERY good and. If you are not able to pull a good key is not the fault of the filter.
Rafael -
I’ve found, especially for material shot on DV or HDV, converting the clip to Uncompressed RGB and then playing with the keys makes a noticeable difference in the edges.
The decompression reduces some of the blocking artifacts. This way you can improve your chances of getting a good key.
But in general there’s no ‘magic bullet’ keyer. If you’re planning on doing a lot of keying, and its a good paying job, aim to get Ultimatte. After that I would rate DV Matte Pro. That’s of course, if the FCP’s keyer, Motion’s Primatte doesn’t do it for you.
Finding a good Shake or Nuke artist who will take your shots, key them in Shake or Nuke and send them back is also a great alternative.
———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up