difficult greenscreen question

[Mark]

I’m not sure that I fully understand your question….

Are you trying to greenscreen, or are you trying to get the Sin City look ???.

If you are trying to key the screen, then Keylight is a good option.

I have also had good results by doing the following:

Duplicate the clip.
On top clip add the change color filter and select the color.
Set filter view to show matte.
Use top clip as rtack matte for bottom clip
Add gaussian blur to slightly blur the matte.

Hope this helps,

Mark

Mark Harvey
Senior Editor
Le Réseau des sports

[Chris Heuer]

I’m not exactly clear about your question. It says you’re having a problem getting a good matte from the footage you have (I can help with that!) but then asks about turning a shot black and white while leaving the screen green (Which confuses me a bit).

If you are having trouble getting a good key, let’s deal with that. Once you have the FG character extracted, you can do anything with the color on it’s, or any other layer.

Can you give us more detail or a description of the final effect you want?

Chris

Chris Heuer
Freefall FX, LLC

[Amelia Cullern]

sorry to be so confusing!

basically i am trying to do greenscreening. i’ve tried with keylight and all the keyers in AE but none of them give me a good key…i get lots of jagged edges that aren’t smooth. i’ve tried softening but you have to soften sooooo much to get a good edge that i’m losing to much footage!

so i thought i’d try a different way to create a matte that i could use for the composite. this is where i thought the sin city effect might come in usefull. i have taken my footage and made it black and white except for the greenscreen, which i have left a bright green. is there any way i can use this footage as some kind of luma/sat/hue matte with my original footage to get a good composite?

hope i’v made a bit more sense now!

amelia

[Chris Heuer]

By Sin City Effect, are you referring to the Grant Swanson Tutorial? Or is this some plug-in that I don’t know?

What format did you shoot the green screen on? It sounds like DV or HDV or worse.

Chris Heuer
Freefall FX, LLC

[Amelia Cullern]

yes that tutorial.

the client shot on HDdvcPro and it’s full of grain hence i’m getting bad edges. and before you say it….no….they can’t shoot it all again!!!!!!!! 🙂

A

[Chris Heuer]

“they can’t shoot it all again!!!!!!!! :-)”

Actually, I wasn’t going to say that! I’ve learned better;-)

Let me review the Sin City tut to see what Grant did to the footage, from there, we’ll devise the plan! I don’t know if you can post a still or short clip of the footage at full res. That may save time, I won’t recommend things that don’t work!

Chris Heuer
Freefall FX, LLC

[Chris Heuer]

OH yeah! While I’m researching, play with Autotrace under the layer menu. Check the box that says “Apply to New Layer”. Try tracing the different channels with different tolerences. You may get pretty close!

Also check out this tutorial by Aharon Rabinowitz:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/junk_mattes.php

This will GREATLY reduce the amount of green you have to deal with which can help your edges.

Chris Heuer
Freefall FX, LLC

[Chris Heuer]

Hello! One more GREAT tutorial that looks perfect for your situation.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/onneweer_barend/keyingtut.php

My other thought is that Although they “shot” DVC Pro HD. Somehow the footage you got isn’t full res. In other words, did you capture the footage from the tape? I suspect it may have been captured using something like a composite cable instead of SDI. It sounds like your color information is lacking.

…or, it’s just REAL grainy. Then, shame on them!

Check out the 2 tuts I sent. They will help any key look a lot better!

Chris Heuer
Freefall FX, LLC

[Ryan Phillips]

I had the same problem. What I did was I first used the denoiser effect from Key Correct Pro. Then I applied Keylight and made a matte. Then I applied the matte choker. That gave me a nice hard edge with very little pixel shift. Damn DVC and its 4-1-1. Good luck.

Ryan

[Darby Edelen]

Some common techniques when working with greenscreen footage include:

-Removing grain
-Using garbage mattes
-Performing one key for the edges and one for the center (settings that provide good edges can often leave holes or other problems in the center of the subject)
-Keying only to generate the matte, then applying that matte to the original footage where spill suppression is applied.

Hopefully some combination of those techniques will help you get closer to the result you want!

Darby Edelen