Contiguous Color Key

[Walter Soyka]

[Kevin Knutson] “Right now I’m working around this by duplicating the layers of interview, and creating a custom mask around the eyes on the lower layer (therefore, the background gets keyed, but the eyes do not). Works fine, but takes way too long since the subjects head moves a lot. “

You might be able to save a bit of time with motion tracking.

Walter Soyka, Principal & Designer
Keen Live: Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak: Our Blog

[Chris Wright]

There’s 3 ways I would do this.

1. motion tracking would be really fast if you set the confidence level to 90% so if he turns,it will break, and you can manually drag it in a few spots.

2. primatte keyer comes with a plugging algorithm that thresholds the size groups of the color being keyed, removing small specks.

3. use my eyeball key script in reverse to alpha out the problem.

https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/

[Kevin Knutson]

Well sometimes its nice to see my hack fix workarounds arent as hack fix as I thought they were, but still bad news.

The chromaflex performs well, but yeah, definitely a small set back with the reflections. Save hours from lighting, add hours in editing. There’s no free lunch.

[Kevin Knutson]

Thank you Walter, this will probably be my best option.

Seems like a tragic oversight. You can easily do a contiguous color select in photoshop, so one would imagine you could in AE as well. Two people in the same cave inventing different wheels.

[Kevin Knutson]

Thanks Chris,

unfortunately we dont have the $500 for primatte keyer, but good to know its there in the future.

Time to brush up on my motion tracking.

[Chris Wright]

sorry, I forgot to link to my eyeball keyer project. It works like primatte’s plugging but it’s free. Just remove the smart blur and use the comp as a track matte. Also, autotrace can be usefull.
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/50/857313

https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/

[Walter Soyka]

The good news for the tracking in this case is that he’s just bringing in a mask of the same footage (albeit with different alpha), so you wouldn’t have the same perspective issues as you would if you were trying to track in other footage.

That said, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that tracking would be a magic bullet. There will still be plenty of roto to do, but hopefully he will be able to get a decent track and save himself some roto (or have success with Chris’s method).

Walter Soyka, Principal & Designer
Keen Live: Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak: Our Blog

[Ryan Hill]

I’ve sometimes filled holes from keys by playing with extreme values of matte chokers. Use a big negative choker until the hole is filled in, then a big positive choker to remove it from all the edges.

[Kevin Knutson]

So I worked with motion tracking the subject’s earring, and applied it to a small matte layer underneath the keyed out footage layer. Seems to work well, and takes dramatically less time than key framing a mask.

Once again, the cow rocks. Thanks for your time and suggestions everyone.

Still seems like a horrible oversight on Adobe’s part to not have a contiguous key, considering the technology is present in photoshop already.

[Johan Ronström]

I respectfully disagree..

There should be no problem for Adobe to make an effect that works like the magic wand on each frame, with tolerance and a specified color, or the color at a specified position in the frame. Doing that for each frame is already possible in photoshop, and the results, as I have tested on five exported frames, are sufficient for what I was looking for.

There is also the Find Edges effect, that already has the ability to detect edges that could be used for continuous keying.