green screen and dv cam

[Justin Productions]

I do a lot of DV keying. Send me your footage at Tangerin01@gmail.com

I’ll check it out.

Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional

[The Gare]

Out of curiosity Justin, buyt what platform and what keyer do you use?

[Justin Productions]

Sorry, I’m french, what do you mean by platform? My computer?

For the keyer, I use Keylight. I used Boris Continuum Complete, but it was a copy that I buyed on eBay. Since the seller never told me that it was a copy, when I got it, I tryed a few times, enjoyed it, and threw it out in the garbage. Don’t like copies.

So yeah, Keylight is pretty much my favorite, like a lot of persons here. Before I bought Keylight, I used Color Range, the Matte Choker and (sometimes) Aharon’s little trick with the Auto-Trace. Messed around with the Spill Supressor, the Curves, the Levels, rotoscopting, beuhhh. I’m glad I have Keylight now. Pretty much it.

Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional

[Jim Eckes]

my huge mistake, i posted my initial question at 1am last night.

this footage was shot on mini dv! does that make a difference?

Jim Eckes
G5 Quad
4 gb Ram
FCP 5.0
AE 6.5

[Jim Eckes]

i loaded “keylight” and i’m getting a much better key out of it now.

any suggestions on dialing in the settings in keylight?

[Andrew Shanks]

I suggest maybe having a quick look in the tutorials on this site (Use Aharon’s tutorial on creating tight junk mattes as a good starting point
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/junk_mattes/index.html
..and another good one was an old free video tutorial from Total Training on using vector blur https://www.creativecow.net/articles/total_training/AE65/Vector_Blur/index.html I don’t do much DV keying work, but I tried that trick a couple of times and it gave a nice looking result with the edges. I also seem to remember Barend doing a bit of a review on keylight when AE first got it with a quick run through, so have a look for that). Basically the setting depend on what the shot it like, a lot of the time its mucking round with a small bit of screen strength, maybe a dash of pre-blur (being DV) and then while looking at the matte, use the clip white and clip black to get a good matte1. If you have problems with edges I suggest using proceedural matting techniques (again Barend did a tutorial on this ages back).
Maybe doing a quick search on DV keying tips and tricks on this forum (especially looking for the ones that use lumanance (green) channel tricks to get good edges (because in DV, green is the least compressed channel, …if you take your image and look at each channel individually (using the red green blue buttons on the main display) you’ll see how nasty the red and blue channels edges are (blocky) compared to the green channel.
Goodluck!!

Cheers,

andrew

[Jim Eckes]

thanks…good solid info.

jim

[Clint Fleckenstein]

I believe that DV and DVCAM are the same animal, with DVCAM having a faster tape speed. Of course, now that I’ve said that, someone will come along with a correction 🙂

I used to use Serious Magic “Ultra” for keying DV, but I hated stepping out of my normal workflow in addition to using tons of disk space on 32-bit AVIs for my keyed clips. Then the AE 6 with Keylight came out, and I’ve never looked back. Don’t get me wrong…Ultra is amazing at what it does. But I’ve pulled some very nice keys from properly (and improperly) lit DV footage.

Just play around with it and you’ll get the hang of it. Just yesterday I picked up a project that had been on hold for a while, an instructional video with a little girl in front of animated vector cartoon animals. Having had more practice with Keylight I was able to improve dramatically on the Keylight settings from when I originally started the project. It just takes lots of experimenting.

Clint