How to capture video best for keying

[David Bogie]

Keying relies on three things: Lighting the set properly, adequate chroma resolution, and adequate pixel resolution. DV blows because of the pixel quantizing. The best keys have those buzzing squares because that’s what the pixels look like.
If you can’t all three of those factors working in your favor, you learn how to cope. With DV, that often means suing several copies of your footage each processed with a different type of keyer, image enhancer, or matte filter. When you combine theam all together, you can get a lovely matte.

You can research chromakeying with DV endlessly o the Net and, if that’s the only video format you’ve got at your disposal, you can get a DV-specific or DV-friendly keyer. One of them is called something like DV Garage.

bogiesan

[Kevin Camp]

you could probably better specifics for capturing in premiere in the premiere forum, but in general, for keying in ae, hdv is about as bad as it gets codec-wise.

hdv has heavy compression of it’s color components, which is really bad for keying. plus, it uses inter-frame compression, which is really bad for working in ae.

since you are capturing via firewire (i assume firewire400), the best codec you may be able to use is dvcprohd (also called dvcpro100), but i don’t know how that works in premiere. i do know that starting with cs3, there is native support of panasonic’s p2 media and that uses the dvcprohd codec, so you may be able to set premiere up with p2 settings to capture to dvcprohd.

the advantage of dvcprohd is that it will give you better color sampling (more color data to work with in keying) and it only uses intra-frame compression, which works much better in ae.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Todd Kopriva]

The “Keying introduction and resources” page includes links to several good resources about acquiring footage for keying. There’s also a link to the KeyerforDV animation preset, which helps a bit with keying DV footage.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Steve Roberts]

It’s a shame for a good Irishman to admit it, but I’m not up on my new cameras …
(sorry, lame reference)

… but do you have access to a camera that can record to hard drive through the HDMI port? If so, you might get better results. This is way out of my depth (!) though, so unless one of the wise folks here can offer something, you might want to check a videography forum.

[Drew Jensen]

You talk about converting the format. I have a few more questions if you don’t mind answering them. So, I’m using a Canon XH-A1 and we use firewire connection to record using premiere pro. Now, is there a different codec/format I can use in premiere pro to capture for better editing and chroma keying, or do I just need to convert it after being capture? If needing to convert, can you recommend a codec/format to use and program to use?

[Drew Jensen]

I really wish I could have gotten a Mac but I didn’t have that much pull here at work when they were deciding on a computer for editing. We don’t really didn’t do editing for this so we really didn’t know what kind of setup to get but now we are starting to regret the stuff we got as I learn more and more. Anyways, could you possibly recommend a camera under 5,000 or so that can capture using a good codec for AE?