Blue screening with blue shirt … ?

[Joe Moya]

I don’t know of an EASY solution to your problem…

The easiest solution… is to add a tight matte layer of the original video behind the shirt to fill in the wholes created by the keyed layer.

Other than that simple solution, the only other work around that comes to mind and will work for certain is to roto-scope the video… and, if you have a lot of video… that will take a HUGE amount of time unless you try and use MOCHA software… even then, there is no guarantee it will work or look well.

Hopefuly, others may have better suggestions…

Joe Moya

[Dumeyni Arnaud]

Thanks for answering Joe.

My “decent” matte of its shirt is what you advised me, multiples mattes one on the top of another.
I found another solution with Keylight, its the screen despot black option that will fill matte’s holes. Works fine.

I still end up with a non blue shirt. I duplicate it, color correct to put some blue back into it, and trackmatte it to alpha.
Its better but theres still some spill and noise around the shirt, not very sexy.
Whatever i’m trying it looks the same.

[Daryl Booth]

Re-shoot it in non-blue clothing and send a memo to all talent NOT TO WEAR BLUE/GREEN for shoots…

I am suprised you did not pick it up on day of shoot…

salutations from codemonkey

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Dave LaRonde] “Just as you wouldn’t try to green-screen Kermit The Frog, this guy doesn’t belong on a blue screen. You have to re-shoot. You can NOT salvage this video with chroma keying software.“

I couldn’t agree more, Dave. The second I opened the original question and saw the image, I immediately thought that a well-lit green screen would have worked. But blue? Not a chance.

Gray hair, gray in the shirt — not to mention that there is actually blue itself in the shirt — will all work against a successful key shot against a blue screen. Green would have been far better.

As you said, roto or reshooting are the only two ways out of this one that I can see.

Note: For those bumping into this thread later using the search engine, first let me congratulate you for using it and add that when keying, look at the colors that are in your shot and find the color that is not there, use that for your keying color. Things do not have to be blue or green only. I once set up a shot with a red screen and keyed on that. With the power of today’s keying software, you can do a lot of things that earlier means of keying couldn’t do in days past.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Nuno Chaby]

Hi!

I’ve downloaded your jpeg and used two instances of premiere pro cs3’s color key. In 3 minutes I’ve got promising results. You should try it.

regards

[Brian Pitre]

This is one idea that may or may not work (because I’ve never had this situation before). You can try cutting a matte out of a solid layer that is the same color as the blue screen. The cut would have to be exactly the same size as the shirt area, and it would have to be placed directly underneath the video layer that will have the key applied. This should add the blue back into his shirt when you apply the key effect to the video layer. Then you can motion track the entire sequence using a part of the shirt for the reference. Apply the tracking data to the solid and preview. As the long as you’re tracking for position, rotation, and scale, this could work.

The better idea is to get the guy back for another shoot…

[Nuno Chaby]

Hi again!

I tried to reach you earlier but I don’t know if I did it right. I’m new to creativecow.net. I downloaded your jpeg and used two instances of Premiere pro cs3’s color key. In 3 minutes I’ve reached very promising results. You should try it.

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t know beans about AE.

But I think I could save this job as-is, by doing a rough garbage matte on the guy and just concentrating on changing the blue background to green. Then once the BG is set to that, try to do the entire comp as per usual. This would be faster and easier than roto.

A quick method to try would be to use the color sampling tool on the BG blue and have AE’s color change feature just alter that shade; you can probably choke the tolerances just enough to avoid color-correcting the shirt. The lasso tool could be used to rough-in a garbage mask to include or exclude the alteration.

Another alternative would be to skip chromakey at first, make this a luma or difference key job. You could do this by working in just the luma channel to build the matte, then use blending modes. It is incredible what you can do by just using histograms and playing with extreme settings in just one channel. Once the luma mask version is clean, just swap it in for the blue screen in your stack.

But this is just supposition because I don’t know beans about AE.

It is, however, what I’d try with the tools I have.

“Never give up! Never Surrender!”

[Brian Berneker]

You can always manipulate the heck out of it on a duplicate layer using curves, levels, hue and saturation and any combination of madness that will separate those ever so subtle differences in the blue. Then just hide the layer and borrow the layer mask.

I used a similar trick in a shot of the following video to mask for behind the trees (in the close up shot as he goes to tie his laces). I used levels and desaturated a matte to use as a luma matte. Some parts of his face were still coming up with “holes” so I just tracked a rough shape layer over the remaining insides – since the edges were mostly ok, I didn’t have to be too precise.

https://vimeo.com/968993

Brian

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[Dumeyni Arnaud]

Thanks for your answers and my apologies for this late post.

I’ve told the director many times about this. But they just go, shoot and screen for the hell of it because there’s no time to loose ( reshooting is out of the question ) . I can’t go with him everytime he shoots bluescreen since i’m sometimes busy with other editing.

Sometimes shit happens and you gotta deal with it 🙁
If i can next time I will refuse to key this kind of shooting, just like Dave advised in another thread.

So i tried what you guys proposed, color correcting the shirt to make a matte out of it was a nice idea. but I didn’t tried the solid with blue’s shirt yet. I’ve searched about difference keying and luma it led me to dvGarage wich gives some nice results too.

Nuno>Hi, are you using the regular color key or the luma masking one ? I’m not really familiar with Premiere’s keying tools.

Ron> Title message edited for better search results. At least i can do that. ^^