key light 1.2 black noise

[Curious Turtle]

What does the matte look like in Status mode?

If it looks good there, then it may be the spill suppression that’s a bit aggressive. Turn Keylight to Intermediate and do your spill suppression with a separate filter.

You also don’t say what the acquisition format is. If it’s a highly compressed format already, then this may be a natural consequence of that. There are a couple of good quick techniques for keying DV that might be useful – just do a quick forum search.

Cheers,
Ben

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[Ammon Wiese]

I am having the exact same result. No matter what settings I make, I cannot make the Final Result look good. It has lots of noise in the black area. The intermediate result looks great, however, it does have a bit of a green tint to it.

In the status view the matte has a greenish tint in all the black pixels, how do I get them to look white? My assumption is that will help to improve the final result.

If you have a suggestion let me know, I can also provide screen shots and sample footage if it helps.

Ammon Wiese

[Ben Flax]

Hey there,

Good point Ben, I recently was working on a similar issue and found that occasionally Keylight’s Screen replacement function (SOFT COLOUR mode in particular) is the real culprit. If you change screen mode to source, then you can lose the noise and still use keylight’s final result. This lets you use the color correction tools to reduce spill. If you need edge correction, sometimes this is a way you can smooth out that aggressive black replacement.

Hope that helps,
Ben Flax

[Andrew Somers]

I agree with Ben Heusner

Keylight can make a decent enough key, but its spill suppression is pretty awful.

PERSONALLY: I use keylight to create an alpha (set to INTERMEDIATE result, then use that layer as a track matte), and remove SPILL using the HUE/SAT effect (set to narrowly affect just the spill color).

A key to getting good results (pardon the pun) is to *not* try and do too much all in one step/layer/effect.

— Break it up into smaller steps/chunks. —

A layer to generate an alpha, some effects to remove spill (instead of trying to get it all out with ust ONE HUE/SAT effect, stack two or three HueSat effects to more gently remove the spill, for instance).

By creating an ALPHA (instead of keylight direct on the layer) you can then use blurs and levels, and or choke, to adjust the alpha separately from the Keylight plug in, gaining finer control.

Side note: ULTIMATTE used to be my favorite software based key plug in – it’s not dead on AE CS5 and later, but lives on in the latest NUKE.

[Ben Flax]

I agree that you have more control by just using the alpha from keylight, and then correcting the source by hand. Auto-spill supression in all the major keyers (primatte, keylight, sometimes even ultimatte) can be clumsy. If you need to make a stack like that, and even double it and find edges and blur a second track matte to do some edge correction, it’s probably a more versatile workflow.

HOWEVER, all I’m saying is simply that you can turn off keylight’s hyperactive spill supression by setting screen matte to source. Then you have the option to use the color correction tools in keylight or otherwise.

Also, I agree, ultimatte is the best.
😉

[Brandon Pines]

Hi Andrew,

Would you be able to point me in the direction on what the steps are to make my key on a new layer per your advice above? I just googled creating track matte/alpha but do not see anything that would follow your advice to make a key’ed layer into an alpha.

If I am reading this right it becomes a 3 step process. Key the subject, make layer into track matte and then use hue/sat to fix spill.

Would the alpha work if the subject moves alot?