Best keyer…

[Andrew Shanks]

Hi Brad,
keylight in AE is streets better than any of the keyers that come as standard with FCP or Avid, so your initial instincts would be correct (use the edit application you are most comfortable with, export a quicktime REFERENCE sequence from there (so you’re not recompressing the footage, it is linking to the captured source footage for max quality), do the keying in AE, render from there, edit back into your finished programme (if necesary) or convert straight to Flash.

Having said that, if the green/blue screens have been lit well, and your flash animated sequences are being scaled down in size in the final output, you might actually be able to get away with just pulling keys within your keyer. I’d be inclined to do a test on one clip using the editors keyer, output it to a flash file of the final dimensions, and see if it will do.
Just for the sake of saving you a step having to go into AE (and thus saving time).

Goodluck,

andrew

🙂

[Brad Baker]

Thanks so much for your help Andrew! I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Brad

[Erik Pontius]

I did a similiar project recently. I captured and cut all my selects on Avid Xpress Pro, exported the clips and keyed using AE and Keylight. The green screen the actor was shot against wasn’t the best and I had hundred or so clips to do. With Keylight I was able to set up the settings after finding the right combination and then save it as an preset. I was then able to just drop the preset on the clips and adjust a little if needed.
In my case, the clips were going to be incorporated into a larger flash piece as a kind of avatar, so I exported the clips directly from AE using the Flash 8 Flix exporter from On2 Technologies. Flash 8 supports an alpha channel and the On2 flix exporter has option to include the alpha.

Erik