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FCP & Red Giant Primatte Keyer Pro
Argh! Primatte Keyer Pro for FCP is driving me crazy. I’m running on a quad core MacPro, 20Gb RAM and 64-bit. Primatte Keyer is awesome, but it’s so unwieldy in a timeline. I’m doing a 10 track music video and I want to lay a green screen, lip-synched track of the whole song on top of the 10 tracks so that I can weave in a few short clips of the green-screen performance. First problem: If I dbl-click on the new track 11 and apply Primatte Keyer in the Viewer, the render takes over an hour. Second problem: If I make a later adjustment in Primatte key OR if I move track 11 to synch it better with the original audio, I lose the whole render and have to start over. So, here’s what I’ve tried. I’ve tried creating a new Sequence and nesting the Primatted track11, but this didn’t improve the render problem. So, I exported the rendered track 11 as a QT file and re-imported it. But this lost the Alpha channel. So, I then exported the rendered track 11 as a ProRes444 clip. This DID preserve the Alpha channel, but the Primatte filter didn’t come with it, so I can’t tweak the key anymore. PLUS, it’s still true that if I adjust reimported 444 track 11 of the whole song, I need to re-render for hours. Argh! So how do you guys do this? What’s the value of this pro level green screen plug-in if it’s so finicky to work with?
Thanks,
Robert -
5 Replies
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[Robert A. Jonas] “What’s the value of this pro level green screen plug-in if it’s so finicky to work with?”
It’s not the keyer, it’s how layers work in FCP. If you need to adjust only a small part, then blade around that part you need to adjust and render only that part. That way you don’t have to render the whole thing every time.
I don’t quite get why you need 10 layers underneath a key, but hey, crazier shit has happened.
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Jeremy, Thanks. So, I get two ideas from you. First, even though I have 10 tracks, I can locate the new lip-syched Primatted track only and specifically above the track that I want to use for background. And second, I can cut up the new lip-syched Primatted track and only render the subclips that I want to include in the final project. So, here’s another question: If I don’t yet know which of the original ten tracks that I want to use as background for the new lip-syched Primatted track 11, it seems I have to put it above all of them. If I render the new Primatted track 11 first, then I can see through it to the possible background clips beneath it, and make a judgement about where are the best locations for track 11 subclips to stay put. BUT, as soon as I cut track 11 into subclips, I have to re-render everything. What would you do about that? One idea I thought of is to NOT use Primatte Keyer on track 11, but rather to just bring the opacity down, and to make the judgements about subclip placement in this way (so that I can see through it to the lower layers). And then, once I’ve decided on placement, to Primatte key only those track 11 subclips that I want to keep. Have you tried that?
thanks,
Robert -
Tell me more about your project and what is being keyed and what isn’t.
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I use this same keyer and I feel your pain. The deal is that Primatte Keyer Pro is archaic, it only uses one core and no GPU. It’s as slow as it gets.
Extremely frustrating, it takes 1 hour per minute using 1920×1080 progressive footage in ProRes 422 for me. I am currently planning on ditching PKP the next time I need to key a project. There hasn’t been an update to PKP in ages.
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Elijah, Thanks for sharing your frustration with Primatte plug-in for FCP. Yes, they need an upgrade. Their tech folks don’t really know what to say about my problem.
Jeremy, Thanks for asking for more details. I realize that I’ve been a bit sloppy about codecs and framerates, and that that may be part of the problem with the slow render times for Primatte Keyer. Some of the footage in this project is from a Panasonic dvx100B, in NTSC 24p; part is from the HMC150 in PR422, 24p;and the new green-screened footage is in PR422,1080, 30p. The Sequence which appears to be handling these varied formats is 24p, NTSC 480. But maybe it’s not able to handle it. So now I wonder if I should downrez the HiDef green screen footage first, to 480, and then bring it into the timeline (how would I do that?). I’m assuming that the 24p, NTSC 480 timeline can handle the 30p footage, but maybe that’s one source of the huge rendering time. If all this sounds right, how would you bring the varied codecs and frame-rates to some common ground? By the way, I have found through direct experience that exporting the Primatted 1080, 30p footage in PR444 and then re-importing DOES retain the Alpha channel of the key, but the downside is that this re-imported file does not retain the Primatte Alpha key controls.
thanks
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