Chroma Key Editing

[Vince Becquiot]

Primatte has given us the best results most of the time. You can also try Keylight which comes with AE.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Mark Whitney]

There really aren’t many options within Premiere for matte extraction software, largely because it’s an editing program. I can’t speak for FPC other than I’m sure Motion could do what you need certainly, but I’m not familiar with the workflow.

After Effects CS3 and higher comes bundled with KeyLight (from The Foundry) which is a very good keying plug-in. Although there are others you could purchase, I doubt you’d find them any more capable. I’m dating myself, but I used to work a lot with the hardware version of Ultimatte. Yikes!

Although I’m using the CS3 versions of both Premiere and After Effects, I don’t have the premium bundle which means I don’t have the Dynamic Link. Fortunately, the work around is pretty simple and I’d think would work for you w/o the CSx product.

I’ll edit in Premiere w/o doing any keying but allow tracks for background layer and a tracking layer. On the timeline, select the edited clip that needs keying and note the duration of the clip then simply Ctrl-C to place its info into the Copy buffer. Open up AE and create a new comp. You can set the comps duration to match the clip length OR just do a Ctrl-V to paste the clip into the new comp. It’s most likely off the screen in AE’s timeline so just select the clips layer and hit [ to bring it’s IN point to frame 0. Hit O to go to the clips OUT point then N to set the work areas end point. Trim the comp to match the work area and your ready to go. AE’s comp is set up, matching your Premiere clips IN and OUT points. You could import your BG layer as well or simply have a good substitute. Your NOT going to render out the final composite at this stage.

Set up Keylight as needed, and save a Preset if this is typical footage. Once your ready, all your going to do is render out the track matte then import it into Premiere above the target clip. Change the appropriate settings to use this new clip as a tracking matte.

Beyond that, I’d download the sample clips and study the tutorial scenes for Keylight.

Good luck,

Mark

[Eric Jurgenson]

You may want to consider a Matrox RTX2 card. The included chroma key filter is excellent, simple to use, and real time, which saves a lot of time if you have a lot of chroma keyed material to process.