In desperate need of assitance with keying a shot with a lot of spill

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

The actor was too close to the chroma and it looks that there were no lights set with color gels from behind the actor to separate the details (like hair) from the background.
I tried a Luma key and it will get you closer but it’s not clean. Sorry to say but rotoscoping may be your best bet. Try Rotobrush – it’s not intuitive so watch the tutorials if you never done this before.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Marc Nibor]

the “Primatte” keyer plugin delivers excellent results. I have seen it do things that made my jaw drop. You should give it a try.

One word of advice. Although in normal cases it’s almost a one button solution because of it’s auto feature I think that in your case you should spend some time with the manual settings.
Here’s a hint. Go into the composite controls of the plugin, enable “spill killer” and here comes the tricky part… try a setting of 40-50 to begin with. The confusing thing about this setting is that you might think either a low or high setting might be good. thruth is, that there is only a very narrow range – usually somewhere around the numbers i just mentioned working, while the high or lowest setting will most likely give you no result at all.

Good luck. and maybe let us know if it worked out for you

EDIT: Ok, I just asked around and here’s a very fast mini tutorial for you that should give you an idea within minutes if it will work in your case and may save you from the hassle of learning the whole plugin just for this test.
download and install the demo >
>apply the plugin to your footage.
>press keying>auto
>set keying>sampling style to rectangle
>click on keying>selection>clean FG
>now drag a rectangle within the face of your actor – make sure you dont include any fo the background color.
>everything should look halvway ok by now except for the spill
>go down to composite controls>spill killer
>check “enable”
>set color mode to green
>set the range value to 50% and decrease it in small steps.
be aware that this setting works only in a quite narrow range. if you miss this range you probably won’t see any result.

[Frank Feijen]

Seems to me that the edge-not-effected-by-the-spill-killer is rather yellow instead of green, maybe dialling in yellow instead of green as spillcolor might help?

[Jaymes Romero]

this actually helped quite a lot, although the subject is pretty noisy as hell lol

[Jaymes Romero]

funny you should mention the rotobrush as one of the avenues i was going to try was importing the footage into photoshop, using the color corrector tool (which im wondering why in the hell there’s not a version of that in after effects because it works so well) on each frame.

[Mark Thompson]

Jaymes, if a Photoshop Color Corrector works for you on one frame and may well work on all frames – you could use Photoshop’s video support. I have used it on short clips.

Mark