bad keying in AE 8

[Darby Edelen]

Those look like chroma jaggies. Try smoothing the chroma prior to the key or inside of Keylight (I believe they call it ‘smooth’ or perhaps ‘blur’).

You haven’t seen anything like this ever in 7.0?

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Brendan Coots]

Are these two clips the exact same clip with the EXACT same Keylight settings, only one is from 7 and one from CS3?

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Peter O’connell]

Your footage is incorrectly interpreted in AE 8. Right click the footage in the project window to open the interpret footage dialog.
Pete O’Connell

[Daniel Haworth]

yes, same footage, interpreted correctly, i think, as dv50 29.97 (see https://www.timanderic.com/badaekey/interpret.png). have tried softness and various other parameters inside keylight, it softens edges but not in a desirable way…they vibrate with motion. looks perfect in also updated to latest keylight (v1.2) in AE7 & 8(cs3), nothing seems to help.

[Darby Edelen]

Try turning Preserve Edges off, just a thought.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Daniel Haworth]

tried preserve edges on/off, 8/16 bits in projects settings, match legacy/blend colors on/off, nuthin. here’s another sample:

https://www.timanderic.com/badaekey/sample2.jpg

Spoke with adobe, no luck, trying keylight (foundry) now, though i suspect it’s a setting in AE.

[Peter O’connell]

Why don’t you download a trial of Primatte for AE to see if you can pull a primatte key that doesn’t have those jaggies (there is a dv setting in primatte). Then you will know whether it is an AE problem or a Keylight problem.
Or you could google a technique for smoothing DV for keying by first changing the image into yuv or equivalent colourspace then blur the 2 colour channels only but not the luminance one.
Sorry, I thought for sure it was a footage interpretation problem.
Good Luck
Pete O’Connell

[Carey Dissmore]

I can confirm all the same problems. This is not an isolated incident. My footage is also DV50 and I’m starting to suspect a codec issue, but I haven’t nailed down exactly what is in play just yet. This is a real PITA. It’s costing me a lot of time on a very tight deadline and I can’t afford it! 70+ minutes of footage to key!

[Jonathan Krisel]

To narrow it down further. I have one computer where the keying looks great in AE7 and bad in AE8. But on another computer AE7 and AE8 both look the same with bad jagged edges. I think it is a codec issue as well. Is anyone out there getting great DV50 keys in AE8? Somebody must be, right?

[Carey Dissmore]

One of the infuriating things is this issue is really hard to track down, as it’s manifesting differently on different systems.

I’ve now tested on 3 machines, one of which has 2 boot systems

Quad G5 2.5ghz 8GB RAM
-OS X 10.4.11, (Blackmagic Multibridge Extreme drivers)
AE 7:
Keys jaggy on Nucleo or multiprocessing renders, clean on standard AE renders

-OS X 10.5.2, (Blackmagic Multibridge Extreme drivers), AE 8:
Keys jaggy on Nucleo or multiprocessing renders, clean on standard AE renders

Mac Pro Quad 2GB RAM (no video hardware)
-OS X 10.5.2, AE 8:
Keys jaggy on Nucleo or multiprocessing renders, jaggy on standard AE renders

Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo 2GB RAM (no video hardware)
-OS X 10.5.2, AE 8:
Keys jaggy on Nucleo renders, jaggy on standard AE renders.

So the only way I can get a clean key rendered right now is to use the first machine, with Nucleo or multiprocessing disabled.

What a PITA! (slowing me down—lost about 4-5 hours to troubleshooting this!