keylighting / inside masks

[Kevin Camp]

like dave says, if you use a mask to define the area that you want to key, do exactly what you’ve descibed… use the mask tool to ‘crop’ your footage, then apply keylight. you won’t need to set inside/outside masks.

in keylight, the inside mask would be use to define an area that you would not want to key out… maybe the subject had a green tie on and you were losing that tie. you could create a mask around the tie and set that mask as the ‘inside mask’ in keylight. keylight would ignore that are when it was keying.

the outside mask could be use to mask out an area of the frame that you wanted to key out. in this case you would create a mask around the area that you want key light to not include when it keyed… maybe there was a light stand in the shot.. you’d create a mask around the light stand and set that mask as the outside mask. it’s kind of the opposite of what you are trying to do…

and aharon’s tutorial is worth watching, if not for this particular keying project, it will definitely help with other keying projects… the keylight manual also has a good tutorial for accomplishing the same thing by using two instances of keylight, one for a garbage matte and one for the final key… although i’ve found aharon’s to be more useful (running two instances of keylight takes longer to render).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW