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Is Keylight High-End Enough?
Even with my years of experience in video post production and with AE, I still cannot pull a clean key with Keylight. All our footage is shot with the HVX or DigiBeta in a professional studio with appropriate lighting (i.e. well lit background, minimal shadows, etc.) and composited in AE7 (Windows XP). I know and understand the normal steps to take in Keylight, as well as the parameters to tweak to achieve that “perfect key”.
To be clear, I can tweak my way to a solid white alpha over solid black, but when I view the final comp, the keyed image is very grainy. Sure I can use Remove Grain but the render times are brutal for what should be a very simple process. I have also used the tip of selecting Intermediate Result instead of Final Result but that doesn’t fix the problem.
We are lucky enough to have six and seven digit budgets for these projects, and with our resources we should be able to achieve near Hollywood level composites; instead I’m becoming envious of the local weather broadcast.
I’m not arrogant enough to say the problem isn’t with me, so if anyone knows of a tutorial for pulling high-end keys (that is, not DV) please post it. Or if I’m expecting to much from Keylight and/or AE what products should we consider?
I know this was long-winded but I’m out of ideas and I know this community is very knowledgeable. Thanks all!
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11 Replies
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don’t know, keylight has been used for several recent blockbuster feature films….
I’ve never had much trouble with keylight. Most of the time success is just a couple of clicks and maybe a second application of the effect or a garbage matte to clean up a bad area.
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Why don’t you post an uncompressed frame of both the before-and-after shots for us to have a look at?
I feel that it’ll be a good idea for the COW to create a new forum, Matte Creation – one that is not software specific. There seems to be so many ways to skin a cat and good keyers (the folks that actually perform the task) usually have more than one technique handy. This is to account for the large variability in terms of the quality of the footage that come their way.
HTH
Roland Kahlenberghttps://www.broadcastGEMs.com – Adobe After Effects project files
https://www.myspace.com/rorkrgbspace -
I also don’t think that the “hollywood” guys are simply using an $$$ keyer and just taking footage and clicking a color to key and out pops a perfect key. I think those compositors spend a lot of time tweaking their mattes and rotoscoping to get good keys. I don’t think that there is a professional magic bullet one-click solution for a really good key.
Erik
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I would have to agree though, My keys have been very grainy and im considering getting shake for it, but we’ll see I guess.
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I have found that Keylight is not a one click keyer. I like the control it gives me but it does take some time to figure out. I end up tweaking many of my settings to really get what I want. Many of the compositors I work with don
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Hi, do you first blur the UV channels in YUV space? That’s pretty important.
Also, Primatte is great for solid edged keys (buildings, jackets etc…). Keylight is great for hair and stuff with a lot of subtle transparency. If you have the budget get primatte, it even has the UV blur built in.Pete O’Connell
http://www.barxseven.com -
I used keylight exclusively when I worked on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and I know that studio used it on Day After Tomorrow, Hellboy and others as well. So to answer your question, YES it is a capable keyer. But I frequently have to divide out the actor into head/body/other as three seperate key layers to get ideal results, and even then some roto and other techniques are needed at times.
As for the grainy issue, I haven’t seen that in high-end footage, it really shouldn’t be doing that. What format/codec is the footage delivered to you in? How has it been pulled from tape? If something is being done that compromises the quality of the footage before it gets to you, that needs to be fixed first.
it sounds like you understand the basic useage of Keylight so I won’t go into that, but Andrew Kramer has a really good overview if you’re interested:
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/colorkey/index.htm
If you have large budgets as you’ve indicated, you might want to convince your shop to look into Primatte, it really works great on everything from DV to film plates. Render times are much longer than Keylight, but it’s almost always worth it.
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I think that a lot of the “grain” is keylight’s default choice of a light gray for color replacement during spill removal, which shows up a lot when using DV footage. I’ve been able to pull pretty good keys from HDV and DV footage using keylight by using techniques like the “super tight junk mattes” and Andrew’s keying tutorial….along with a lot of tweaking. I’ve used demos of other keyers like Primatte and they are good, still not a one-click solution, but I personally couldn’t justify the cost…I still had to do some tweaking to get good results.
Erik
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I get grainy footage when keying with keylight as well – probably caused in part by the light grey mentioned earlier.
The way I get around it is to key the footage until it’s as good as I can get it, then use the keyed footage as a trackmatte for a duplicate of the layer.
All that I have to do then is a bit of spill supression and Bob’s your uncle.Just to clarify:
1)key layer
2)duplicate keyed layer, remove effects from duplicate layer and move it below the keyed footage
3)trackmatte the keyed footage onto the duplicate layer.Hope taht helps.
Dave
Currently working on ‘Lookin’ For Lucky’ – Feature Film for Albino Injun Productions.
http://www.lookinforlucky.co.uk
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Right, I forgot about the spill supression/grey pixels thing. I guess I’ve just been lucky and never really encountered that.
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