Keying in Final Cut Studio 2

[Jeremy Garchow]

I use Boris Continuum Complete for keying, but I found that footage has to be in 10bit and come from a well shot/lit source. Most footage I work with comes from either the SDX900 (dv50) or Varicam (dv100) and I capture @ 10bit. Working in native codecs always produced substandard results.

You can also try dvmatte blast and conduit. There’s Ultimatte, but I don’t think they are going to make a Universal Binary plug in last I heard, perhaps that has changed.

Jeremy

[Steve Eisen]

FCP is not to blame for keying. It begins with your source footage.

Primatte filter in Motion is good. Check out DVGarage’s DVMatte Pro.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Director-At-Large
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Walter Biscardi]

FCP keys great if you have uncompressed footage that is properly lit. Give it DV, DV50, DVCPro HD, HDV or other compressed format and you’re going to have some difficulties, especially if the lighting is not correct.

I use Boris Continuum Complete for all my keying and it does work well. If that doesn’t work, I drop out to Shake to key.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Drazen Stader]

Hi Walter,

Thanks for the comment. The price for Boris Continuum and Shake is almost the same, which one do you think is a better investment…Shake is a mighty powerful application as far as I am informed but a steep learning curve…on the other hand Boris seems like a very friendly orineted program – or better say fcp plugin…if possible tell me your opinion…thanx a bunch

Best regards

Drazen

http://www.staderzen.com

[David Jahns]

agree with previous – of course, well shot, uncompressed is best, etc.. but the reality is we are often asked to polish a turd, right?

I’ve found DV Matte Pro (FCP Plug) to be a fantastic keyer – especially for substandard footage with DV compression. And for $200, it can’t be beat. Check out the demo & tutorial at dvgarage.com

It won’t give you Lord of the Rings quality, but anyone shooting DV or HDV better not be expecting LOR quality, right?

I’ve also heard great things about zMatte Pro by Digital Film Tools, but I haven’t tried it out, as I’ve been happy with DVMP.

[Arnie Schlissel]

I’ve gotten good keys with Conduit from DV Garage. It works in both FCP & Motion. It’s not very straightforward, but once you wrap your head around it, it can be very powerful. Shake, OTOH, kicks butt.

Re Shave vs Boris, it’s really a matter of your needs. Do you need a bunch of plugins for FCP, or do you need a really powerful compositor? Maybe you need both?

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[David Jahns]

YES – Conduit is very cool, and powerful -EXCEPT for the fact that it doesn’t have any kind of garbage matte built in. I’m always having to crop out C-stands, etc… but if you have really clean and evenly lit backgrounds, Conduit is very sweet.

In fact, it’s worth downloading the demo and playing with it, just to wrap your head around the nodal interface. It will make Shake sees a lot less intimidating if you spend a few hours with Conduit first. Once you get the Nodal Workflow, it’s brilliant, and you’ll hate working in layers from that point forward.

[Drazen Stader]

Hi everyone,

your advices are extremely helpful conduit and then shake seems like the path to go…only pitty shake has been discontinued…what a shame…hopefully in the next relase they will mix it with motion and add shake’s nodal workflow into it…this way the investment in the learning curve will pay off…at least a little bit..

best regards

Drazen

[Jeremy Garchow]

Just remember that keying pays off around the edges of your subject. The inside area of the edges of the matte, of course, is the most important but it’s also easier to key the inside. For footage that is not ideally lit and you work to get the inside matte proper, the edges tend to suffer. Footage that is more chroma compressed (i.e. dv and hdv) will bring more jagged edges around the fringe to start with. There are ways to ‘rebuild’ the information, but I have found it’s best to have the most information possible to begin with and then wrap that information in a big old blanket of uncompressed. Even dv50 footage (which is 4:2:2 and has a decent amount of chroma info to begin with) benefits tremendously by going to 10 bit through a dv50 deck via SDI and not just by rendering through quicktime/media manger/ or other software. There are also lighting cues that should be followed when shooting, but I feel that is a different subject and post.

jeremy

[Arnie Schlissel]

I suspect (hope?) that this is the way they’re going. They’ve already added some of Shake’s features to the new version of Motion, perhaps they’ll steal a few features from motion to add to the replacement of shake?

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog