FCP and green screen work

[Jerry Hofmann]

The keyer in FCP isn’t the best in the suite. I think the keying in Motion is a lot easier to get done. You’ll want to shoot 422HQ if there’s a lot of movement going on, otherwise 422 should be just fine. Having the 10 bit video from the Ki Pro will make it pretty easy to do.

Jerry

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[Walter Biscardi]

You’re definitely going about this the right way feeding a video signal to the Ki Pro for recording. A far superior image than if you recorded to the JVC directly and converted to ProRes.

Red Giant Software sells the Primatte Keyer which is very very good in FCP. As Jerry notes, the regular keyer provided with FCP is not very good at all.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
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[Harry Bromley-davenport]

Christoph at CHV Electronics sells a very good one at a very good price ($95):

https://www.chv-plugins.com/cms/FxPlug/KeyPro/KeyPro.php

Best

Harry.

[Tom Daigon]

I agree with Walter,for my money Primatte is the way to go. Ive used it for 12 years with Avid DS and with FCP/AE (where I prefer to do any compositing or efx work). It is quick to use, powerful to control and does the best handling of detail (like hair) that I have sen.

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve Used Primatte as well as AdvantEdge in my FCP system, and both give great results even with 4:1:1 DV format footage.

Still, I tend to do most of my green and blue in FCP’s regular old chormakeyer, and I’ve had good results, EVEN using DV25/DVCPro25. SO IF you work in higher rez, everything should be fine. It is a cliche’, but still true, the more even a lighting job you do on the background, the better the key comes out. It’s not about getting a ridiculously over-saturated or overly hot neon green either, just well-saturated, well-exposed, not hyped up. Keeping the talent far enough away from the green or blue to avoid spill during the shoot is also vital. If you keep a narrow DOF so the green wall goes soft-focus, that will also help with the uniformity of the key. Long as all the talent is still sharp.

Beginners tend to not realize that you can invoke multiple iterations of the keyer to treat separate sections of problem areas, and that the sliders in the visual GUI for the keyer give you a lot to play with, after the initial eyedropper sampling tool is used. Also, they fret about the wall being large enough, forgetting how easy it is to mask things off. You erally only need a few inches all the way around the talent.

I noticed the logo, and would suggest if you are goinhg to have scouts in uniform, maybe a blue screen is a better choice to back behind them than green. Use a light straw or bastard amber gel on the backlight, to help chase any blue spill off the hair and uniforms.

[Tom Daigon]

And adding to Marks fine suggestions, try to light the green screen with
consistent levels across the entire surface. This will make keying much easier. And make sure wardrobe and eye color are accounted for before the shoot.

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Stephen Smith]

I would go with Keylight, a lot cheaper then Primatte and the version of Primatte that comes with FCP & Motion has very limited functionality. Keylight does a great job with hair and glass and it renders fast. It is only $250 or $235 at toolfarm.com

I used to use Ultimatte AdvantEdge, but it will not work with a 12-core machine. When I contacted support I was not happy to read this in their response, “AdvantEdge has been around for nearly a decade now and it is nearing it’s end-of-life.” AdvantEdge is not cheap so that was disappointing.
Best of luck.

Stephen Smith
Utah Video Productions

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