Exporting Finished Videos with Chroma Keyed Footage Issues

[Jeff Kirkland]

Can we see a sample?

When you say it looks good, that’s looks good when it’s background rendered and playing back in FCPX or just the one frame? A common issue when keying, especially with footage of less than stellar quality, is that a still frame can look great but the other frames aren’t consistent enough for the key to hold once things start moving. Camera noise is probably the #1 cause of this.

Also, what are you outputting as? The lower the quality/ more compressed the codec, the more artefacts you’re going to see when you export it – especially if the key wasn’t that great to start with.

I have no idea about the random flashes but you might try deleting any render files and letting fcpx recreate them. Sometimes they can get corrupted and cause weird random stuff.

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Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jon Weaver]

Check out the issue at the link below. You see the flickering and you will see the issue with the hair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mADkjHjAquY&feature=youtu.be

I spent an hour adjusting the key in FCP and it never changes anything even when it looks like it is adding more hair or images.

Does the color of the background you are inserting matter? When i put a dark gray background it takes away that extreme shake and looks better.

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[Jeff Kirkland]

The colour of the background can help hide things if the footage was poorly shot and hard to key but overall, it doesn’t matter.

Can I see a few seconds of footage without the key applied?

Looking at the key, it looks like you’ve done something fairly agressive to the edges, hence the black line around their bodies. The fact they’re casting a shadow on the background probably means they were far too close to the green screen when it was shot so there’s going to be a lot of green spill to deal with and that’s certainly not going to help – especially as there doesn’t look to be any edge light to help seperate them from the screen.

Without seeing the original footage my suggestions would be to either use a Keyer that’s more able to deal with camera noise and poor screen to subject contrast. Hawaiki Keyer has a lot of very refined pre-key and edge tools that can get you out of trouble.

Otherwise I’d key multiple layers, so key their bodies on one layer, key their heads on another, maybe even key parts of their hair seperately.

Another thing to remember is that the final cut Keyer can take samples through time as well as within a frame so you can sample the screen and set edge opacity, etc across multiple frames to build the key.

If you want to post a short sample of the unkeyed footage I’m happy to play and see if I can give some more specific advice.

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Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland