Keying a Curly person – guidelines anyone ?

[Tgjohnson]

Green will be the easiest color to key, but you might think about the background you’ll add in later. I had a similar experience a few months ago and since we were sure about adding a white-based background, we shot him on white and made a very blurry key. It worked out pretty well.

Travis Johnson

[Alexxx]

Hey there,

Unfortunately you are dealing with the worst of both worlds – fine, frizzy hair and DV compression. There is very little that can be done to get a nice key using DV. In best cases DV loses fine hairs, let alone when it’s super-curly. You’ll find that keylight and most other keyers will kill off the finer hairs and fill in the fine holes where you can see the background. This is simply because there just isn’t enough resolution on DV.

If you were shooting a close-up similar to your image and fill the frame as much as possible you will have the best chance. If you are thinking of keying a torso’n’head shot on DV resolution, things are going to get a little messy.

I have had to key out crazy locks of hair on several DV projects and it’s a nightmare to get nice smooth keys without loss of hair. Just keep him as far away from the green-screen as possible to avoid spill.

Good luck with it!

Alex

http://www.lightdrop.com.au

[Ace Billet]

I tried to use DV Matte (not for this project)
but didn’t really like its blurry masks and soft edges.

However, I decided to drop the green screen vid and come up
with another direction. Especially after I’ve seen another
greenscreen video of his band and saw the mess Alex was talking about.

cheers
ace

this kind of better

[Basilisk]

DV camera vary in sharpness. I have keyed footage from and old XL1s and it was a lot worse than that from a XL2. If you are shooting 16:9, make sure your camera has a 16:9 CCD and isn’t just using a slice from the middle of the CCD and stretching it, sampling 400 lines up to 576. Alternatively, if a shot clears the sides you can shoot it 4:3 to get the extra resolution of the whole CCD. Full length shots you can turn the camera on its side to get extra resolution.

Anyway – always get as much resolution as possible, you still get sucky keying, but it wont look quite as bad if you’re not keying fuzzy edges as well.
Alternatively get a quote on shooting with a camera that handles digibeta or DVCPRO 50 – it really is worth it.