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Keying Advice
I received some footage that a project manager wants keyed out. It’s DVCPro 25, standard definition, and the studio that it was captured in uses SDI. It’s not a lot of footage, five minutes at the most.
I can’t seem to get a clean key off this guy. He moves around a little, the camera zooms out to a wide shot at one point and there are some shadows. Using keylight I seem to get a good matte, but his jacket is dancing alot and I’ve got really aliased edges around him. I’ve played with matte chokers and blurs and followed the advice from the tutorials here and on Video Copilot and I just can’t seem to get this guy cleaned up.
From Final Cut, what would be a good codec to export into AE, and then back into final cut for editing? Any advice, as always, is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
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2 Replies
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Thanks for the input Dave!
I had mentioned many of those concerns to the manager and his attitude was, more or less: “Just do what you can with it.”
The studio they shot in, after some research, is very small and, not surprisingly, he told me that they get an enormous amount of bounce from their psyc wall. I asked him if they had considered pulling the talent away from the wall and he said that, due to the size of the studio that pulling him away from the wall wasn’t really “ideal”.
So I told him that, if that was the case, the key wouldn’t be “ideal”. Regardless, I did what I could with it and expressed how difficult it would be if he brought me footage like that in the future. That footage, however, won’t be going anywhere, and I told him what you mentioned: “Re-light and re-shoot.”
Thanks for all the help!
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I don’t know how long the footage is and how much the subject looks but the clothing and the hair make it a good candidate for roto. The podium might be at least easier to key with a mask than trying to adjust Keylight to remove the green reflection. Roto it and the color correct it to remove the green cast. The jacket is also very green and it can be just easier to roto it. If you have a good roto tool like Silhouette Roto it can be actually doable. Create the original mask, track the subject and associate the tracker to the layer containing the mask.
Good luck
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Paolo Ciccone https://www.paolociccone.com
Hellriser Digital
Santa Cruz, CA
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