I am DESPERATE for expertise. PLEASE HELP!

[Bob Woodhead]

Take a look at Ultimatte Advantedge – waaay slow, but the best keying for DV, IMHO. If the screen isn’t lit well near the edges, use a garbage matte 1st to bring your keying range down to just outside the talent. Always, always shrink & blur the key a bit before calling it “done”.

[Appledude]

Thanks guys for the info and your compassion.. dually noted. The keyer you mentioned… have you compared it to DVMATTE PRO or any others? and why do you think it is better? I am trying to keep a strict budget on this but if it works from your trials vs others, then it may be worth the try. You can see that if I bought every keyer out there, I would be looking in dumpsters for a meal afterwards. Thanks..

[Dave Sullivan]

Hello Dude,

Is there anyway you could use the footage as is…..with the green screen as the background? Ie: creative use of matte, graphics, etc…..just a thought.
You could always select the background colour,(as long as you have minimal spill) and replace the green with anouther colour, and place a blur on the selected colour, to blend in the edges.
Hope you get it sorted.

All the best

Dave

Good Robot Productions UK

[Tig Coates]

combustion 4 – mac
diamond keyer

DV bluescreen anyone?

[David Bogie]

> I tried Combustion 3, Shake 4 (Primatte, Keylight), FCP5 plugins like DVMATTE Pro 1.5, ZMatte, FCP Chroma, and a few others. Nothing seemed to work decent at all. In Combustion 3 I tried Chroma Blurring Horizontal and exporting back to FCP and you name it… I’ve tried so many things. I recently bought the Magic Bullet upgrade to try the de-artifactor. I tried keying after rendering it in the timeline in FCP5 and I tried exporting a quicktime file and bringing it back in. < If you've tried all of those tools and are not happy with the results, your photography is the issue. Most of those tools will create superb keys from good green DV. The Canon doesn't have the crispy edges of a $20k Ikegami but you shot it with what you had. You have three choices: 1. Reshoot. 2. Develop a style for the prezo that helps hide your poor footage, or 3. As suggested earlier, use the green as the background. four, you have four choices: 4. Find the right combination of layers and tools that give you what you can say is the best you can do. When AE came with lame chromakeyers, it often took four to six copies of the same layer to get a clean key. Each had a different matte or filter applied to it. Takes time. You may need to lower your expectations. bogiesan This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Zman]

i read all your problems/issues, and dude it was all how you or who ever shot the interviews, you ever watch VH1-I love the 70’s,80’s or 90’s or any MTV/VH1 interview driven show, all done on mini DV cameras, all green screen and all done in a real big hurry, and it all looks pretty dam good, I know cause I do a lot of the work for those shows. so think about your problem from where it all started, your lighting. do you know how to light for green screen, from what i have read it’s a no.

You light for the screen first, then you have to separate you talent from the screen by a few feet 3 to be correct, and then you light for the talent, and then you have to average the 2. thats how you get really good green /blue screen. the 4:1:1 in mini dv does not really put the kabash on your green screen. you could have also tried cutting out the talent and droppinging it on a new screen (screen replacement), also just a little note, you dont need chroma green or blue screen to pull a key, it could be purple or a deep blue all it needs to be is light even, green screen is a hard key, for some crazy reason eveyone thinks you need green for video, not true.

well hope it all worked in the end.

[Appledude]

Wow! Thanks everyone for all of your support. It’s truely humbling to get such good feedback so quickly. Well, the verdict is out for now. I have keep trying ideas until something works “good enough” for what I have to work with. Or the other option is to hire someone out. Either way, my determination might be blind but I am counting on something working out. It just has to.

I’ll be sure to keep you guys posted on anything that ends up working out. Thanks again comrades!

[Dave Sullivan]

Good luck Appledude,

Hope it all goes well, please keep us informed.

All the best

Dave

Good Robot Productions UK

[Bob Woodhead]

I’ve found Ultimatte Advantedge to be better than the others, but it’s not a “superhero” – if you can’t get a “fair” key from DVMattePro, then Adventedge probably won’t give you a “great” key. HERE’S AN IDEA – post a single frame of a troublesome shot & let us look/play with it.

[Annaël Beauchemin]

can you provide us a sample image? It would be much better to see why/where is the problem.