Any expert in Keying out there?

[Claude Rozsa]

Hi Albert, I’m not an expert and do not know the solution, but unless my eyes betray me the lighting on the green screen is not even and especially it seems there’s a slight variation of it around your actor. That can be the cause of your problem. If I remember what I’ve been learned about green screen, you have to have a total regular lighting and a very plane screen behind your characters to prevent any problems.

Claude

[Tero Ahlfors]

[albert trevino] “I have tried shrink/grow but without looking obvious, it didn’t work as good.”

You’ll probably need to shrink and feather the edge. You could also try a light wrap, you can find a tutorial in the COW tutorials.

[Steve Brame]

If you take a good look at your shot, you’ll notice that the green screen is brighter in the center of the screen than at the top and bottom. Also notice that the green halo around your subject is much more prominent toward the center than it is at the top an bottom. When you picked a sample color with the Eyedropper, it was probably closer to the darker area. Try picking a color somewhere in between the dark and light areas and as close to your subject as possible without actually selecting them.

My #1 go-to tutorial recommendation to help with difficult keys…

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/junk_mattes.php

I personally like and have better success with Ultra Key in Premiere. Might want to give it a try.

You can also duplicate your footage onto two layers. Key the bottom layer to the darker area, then key the top layer to the lighter area. Then mask out the upper and lower portions of the top layer using feathered mattes so that the bottom layer can show through, adjusting the mattes so that the two layers blend smoothly.

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[John Cuevas]

You might want to check out the Screen Equalizer plugin. I’ve only played around with the trial version, but it worked pretty well.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I used the demo of Screen Equalizer and got a pretty decent result without too much work. Needed to create 2 keys, but perhaps if I’d taken a bit more time I could have pulled it off with one.

Here’s my quick little test, you’ll need to load the trial version to play around with it.

9024_keyingprojectfolder.zip

Just realized that the reason I needed 2 keys was because the quick & dirty background plate I created was really uneven. You will probably get really good results if you find a frame(s) of video without a subject and will only need 1 key.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[Albert Trevino]

Thank you everyone for you replies!

Claude,
I see what you see in the variation in the color of the green screen. I was able to work with that type of backdrop before.

Tero,
I will look into what you said in regards to the light wrap. I am curious.

Steve,
I will check out that tutorial. I do want to get better at perfecting keying. Our workflow wouldn’t work with using Premiere for keying, so I will have to use After Effects for this

John,
I checked out the screen equalizer and downloaded your sample project. I still saw a line glow around her left arm. I am not sure if the screen equalizer would help in this but it is a very cool plugin! It could take me just using it more and seeing how to get this to work.

Dave,
Not sure what camera it was shot it. It is in MTS format.
Here are the media info specs:

===================== General =====================
Id : 0

Format : BDAV
Format info : Blu-ray Video
File size : 161 MB
Duration (ms) : 1mn 0s
Total bitrate : 22.2 Mbps
OverallBitRate_Maximum/Stri : 23.9 Mbps

===================== Video =====================
Id : 4113 (0x1011)
MenuID/String : 1 (0x1)
Format : AVC
Format info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4.0
Use of CABAC : Yes
RefFrames : 2 frames
Format settings – GOP : M=2, N=12
Codec Id : 27
Duration (ms) : 1mn 0s
Bitrate mode : Variable
Bitrate : 21.1 Mbps
Bitrate maximum : 22.0 Mbps
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Aspect ratio : 16:9
Framerate : 23.976 fps
Colorimetry : YUV
Colos space : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.424
Stream size : 153 MB (95%)

===================== Audio =====================
Id : 4352 (0x1100)
MenuID/String : 1 (0x1)
Format : AC-3
Format info : Audio Coding 3
Format settings mode extens : CM (complete main)
Codec Id : 129
Duration (ms) : 1mn 0s
Bitrate mode : Constant
Bitrate : 256 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
ChannelPositions : Front: L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 1.85 MB (1%)

——————————-

Here is a dropbox download link to a 1 minute sample of the original video shot:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/903fz0ugg7ncbn0/Subject%20A.MTS?dl=0

Again, thanks for the replies and hopefully having a link to the sample original would help in your future replies and assistance!

AL

[Mark Andrews]

I think with what you have, I would try creating a duplicate of the original image and adjust it with some curves. Boost the green, and adjust the contrast to give yourself the best image possible to pull your key from. Then when you do pull your key, set the output to give you just the matte. that will give you your black and white image you can place over the original layer. Set the original to trackmatte the Luma from your key you made.

Then you can adjust the feathering either by adjusting either the properties of your key, or by applying matte adjustment effects like shrink and grow to your original image. Those effects will help you eat away the edges you have if you still need to.

Light wrap really only is going to help you if you are comping the image on a background. You feed it the background layer and it feathers, blurs and comps some of the background around the edges to blend the two images. You probably want to leave that for the person doing the comp.

some other random thoughts …
Make sure you garbage matte out the areas you don’t need before creating your key.
You can combine multiple mattes into one by precomping them and using blend modes to combine them.
Use multiple methods to get the results you are looking for.

[Mark Thompson]

Hi,
if you are still working on this …

I found this very useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S87NTJVcYKU

It is not too long. There are three parts, one is a good guide to filming green screen. The middle part describes how to get a good key. The technique is interesting, they show how to create a garbage matte using a simple key and matte choker. Then how to use Keylight to finish it off.
I tried it on the clip that was posted and it looked pretty good.

mark

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[Albert Trevino]

Hi Guys.

Yeah, still working on this project. Been trying to watch tutorials and taking in your advice and trying different things. The multi-layer keying using the matte as the upper layer didn’t solve the main issue I was having.

One thing I am trying is using the Red Giant Primatte Keyer. It is pretty powerful and has a lot of things built in that you would have to separately like light wrap.
One thing I found that was cool and very useful is using obsolete Color Key with Simple Choker to create an easy dynamic garbage matte.

But as always it completely depends on the shot. This is quite the challenge. Still having issue trying to get rid of the glow on a few of them. And there is one girl that has light brown hair and the format it was shot on is a compressed MP4 video file. Not easy. Might just post examples of that here to get some insight on how I can get a good clean key on that one.

Again… thanks everyone for your valuable input!!

[Albert Trevino]

Ok.

I had to take some time away from the project. I am now back on it. I tried a number of different techniques to try to key the difficult ones. I am at a loss.
I don’t have near the experience in keying as most of you out there and I am sure it would take somebody out there not very long to get it done.
I am at the point where I am willing to pay someone to key the difficult ones I have come across.

The first one being the one I put in the original post as the example. I have a few more as well with similar problems.

ANYONE… ? I AM BEGGING!! PLEAAAASEEEEE!!! Seriously I will pay to get it done! (Be reasonable with price.)

Just key it and send me the AE Project so I can import the settings for Keylight or whatever plugin you use. If I don’t have the plugin, I will buy it.

1st video:

1 minute sample of the actual original source video file. It was in MTS but I used XMedia Recode to change the wrapper to MP4 and removed the audio.
I didn’t transcode the video elements, just copied it to the new MP4 wrapper.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ueoli0ef1s9r28f/Video%20001.mp4?dl=0

2nd video:

1 minute sample of the original MOV video. I removed the sound using MPEG Streamclip.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oboi9f2b4x1fd74/Video%20002.mov?dl=0

3rd video:

1 minute sample of the original MOV video. I removed the sound using MPEG Streamclip.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6oljid4m7v3zktc/Video%20003.mov?dl=0

4th video:

1 minute sample of the actual original source video file. It was in MTS but I used XMedia Recode to change the wrapper to MP4 and removed the audio.
I didn’t transcode the video elements, just copied it to the new MP4 wrapper.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xgyjoypvqr02mk0/Video%20004.mp4?dl=0