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Matting translucent hair
I need to shoot a woman with back lit white translucent hair in one location and composite her into a new location. How well can this be done in AF or do I need a plug in and if so which one? I tried this in PP2.0 ‘s with Matrox’s Chroma Key filter but got subtle luma fluttering in the hair I couldn’t remove without other artifacts.
I used 4:22 codec recorded from the component video out of my Sony Z1 for the foreground. Of course the subject and backgroud have identical lighting, camera height and lens setting, distance, etc.and look perfect.
Do I need a special plugin to do a perfect matt? Ultimatte looks like the best solution but is $1,500. How do zMatt & Primate compare?
Any advice would be appreciated. -
4 Replies
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Yah it sounds like you have a keying nightmare there but don’t underestimate the power of the keying tools you have at your disposal currently.
I also don’t believe any keyer no matter what the price is, is capable of doing a perfect key like that. More then likely, your gonna be doing some fairly tight rotoscoping and and then manually keying the colors out that you don’t want (linear key maybe?) THEN going in and defining the interior edges of the key so that you don’t lose data in the centre (MORE rotoscoping), then plenty of spill suppressor with a feathered mask on an adjustment layer to get the the rest of the background out of her hair.
Total training, pro series, has some rundowns on keying as well. Though i’m sure you know your stuff there.
Also I’m fairly sure you can do that without the use of a 1.5K plugin
I think what in the end what it comes down to is if your footage can even realistically be considered for keying. Some things just wont come out well, the data isn’t there.
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If you have AE Pro then you have keylight. You might want to look at Mark Christian’s book on AE for more information about using keylight. Also, zmatte, ultimatte and dvmatte pro have demos you can try before you buy.
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thanks for all the advice. The Matrox LE keying filter works fine for everything but the hair. We have AF7.0Pro but can’t find anything on Keylight. We did a full install. Did a search on AF Help but didn’t find ref. to it. Is it just called Key? Which is a very simple keyer that didn’t work well for us.
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Also — adding the “remove grain” filter to your compressed footage will be a great help in reducing noisey keys — make sure you use “temporal filtering” as follows (from AE 7 help):
To add temporal filtering to a sequence
Apply the Remove Grain effect to your image.
Place the Remove Grain preview region over the area of the image that has the most subtle changes from frame to frame or that has the most moving image detail.
Select Enable in the Temporal Filtering controls.
Adjust the Amount value to 100%.
Create a RAM preview of the sequence or render it.
If you see unwanted streaking or blurs around moving objects, reduce the Motion Sensitivity value, and then preview or render it again.
Try the following techniques if you want to improve the results:
To quickly reduce the noise of a sequence that has a lot of buzzing noise, set the Noise Reduction value to zero and the Temporal Filtering Amount to 100%, and render the sequence.
To speed up previews, apply temporal filtering to your sequence after all the settings for a single frame have been adjusted.
To retain a layer
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