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Motion + FCP= hair loss
OK, I’ll admit I’m a rank beginner when it comes to FCP, though I have several years’ practice on other NLE’s. Today I got on the system to do some chromakeying, and 12 hours later have yet to be satisfied with the output. Maybe one of you guys could offer some suggestions?
The setup is FCP HD with an IO for input, unfortunately this particular setup (we have 2) does not have SDI, I am taking in the green screen footage as 10-bit analog uncompressed off of a DVCPro25 deck. My best guess is this is fundamentally the cause of my quality problems, but let me go on a bit…
Green screen footage digitized, imported diretcly into Motion as a project. Added a background layer of a simple gradient as a 720×486 targa file. Between the greenscreen layer and the background layer, I have another 720-high targa file of a complicated form that needs filling out. Trying to get the same look as those blown-up giant pages they use in the opening of “60 Minutes” , so you can see the lines clearly while the talent walsk you thru filling them out. This is about a 7-minute clip.
Tried motions’ supplied greenscreen filter, it looked horrible, could not pull a decent matte. Tried the extra plug-in from Ultimatte, and the stills are looking pretty good fromthe get-go. Some tweaking and it looks pretty good, but my preview play-back is not really smooth enough to see if there are any bad artifacts in the motion footage.
Tried rendering as .mov from within Motion… 7 minutes took over an hour. When I brought it into FCP, I found I still had to render it, another hour-plus. (hence the headline for the thread) Finally, it’s done, I play it back, only to see raggedy edge artifacts on the matte, #$@^%#@!$#!,
Re-did everything, tried sharpening the green screen layer, no improvement. Tried again, used the video filter to de-interlace, no improvement, worse if anything. Tried exporting from motion using compressor, export was faster than the .mov, but still had to render once on the FCP timeline, and it still stinks on ice.
I’m pretty sure this is all “pilot error”, but now you’ve had a good laugh at my antics, any pointers you wanna suggest? Take my word, if you will, that the green screen footage was exposed evenly enough. Have cross-posets this to the Motion thread, but really thought to ask you guys first over here because I feel there’s a problem between what’s happeing in Motion and the FCP side.
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9 Replies
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Mark,
I have a one word answer to your hair loss issue. Combustion.
DRW
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I have combustion on there, but have had no training time on it yet and was going even slower so I switched over to trying Motion.
Gawd, I hate trying to learn new software on the client’s time, instead of during a quiet, peaceful sabbatical.Got another word or two that would help with the FCP or Motion problem? At this point, If I don’t have a certain fix for it by mid-moring, I will be out of time and will have to go back to my trusty old Discreet Edit to “get ‘r dun”. I HATE having to surrender like that, but I’m just out of time this week, need to be showing it finished by Thursday PM, so Friday is free for any fixes/changes, it airs Saturday morning.
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I wish I had a short answer for ya Mark like the last answer, but I don’t. If you were sitting right here I’d show you Combustion, but alas its too tough if yu’re just picking it up. I thought for sure you would have learned to use it with Edit*.
Sorry!
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[Mark Suszko] “I am taking in the green screen footage as 10-bit analog uncompressed off of a DVCPro25 deck. My best guess is this is fundamentally the cause of my quality problems, but let me go on a bit…”
That is your primary problem right there, DVCPro 25 footage. Very difficult to pull a clean key off DV quality footage. You have all the compression artifacts in there to deal with.
[Mark Suszko] “Tried rendering as .mov from within Motion… 7 minutes took over an hour. When I brought it into FCP, I found I still had to render it, another hour-plus. (hence the headline for the thread) Finally, it’s done, I play it back, only to see raggedy edge artifacts on the matte, #$@^%#@!$#!,”
I’m guessing you rendered it as a “Lossless” movie rather than a DV-NTSC movie, hence the double render. You need to render it in Motion using the same setting as your FCP Sequence or FCP will need to render the file again.
The raggedy edge artifacts are from the DV 25 footage and the fact that FCP added more compression to your file with the double render.
[Mark Suszko] “I’m pretty sure this is all “pilot error”, but now you’ve had a good laugh at my antics, any pointers you wanna suggest?”
Use the 4:1:1 Color Smoothing filter in the Key filter set. Also go to http://www.nattress.com and look at some of his filters to help smooth out the DV footage for keying. that’s your fundamental problem, DV 25 footage is horrible for keying and you need to apply a lot of filtering to it to first smooth out all the compression and then you can pull a decent key.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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You can also try using to colur key and adjust the feathering. If not Key light in After Effects is perfect… works really well for DVCpro 25 and 50 footage I worked on before. Fast and easy on a G5 with 2 gigs ram. Yeah remember to export back as same codec setting for your sequence to avoid having to re-render again in FCP timeline.
Cheers man!
marf
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i agree with walter.
main problem is dv. i am the WORST graphics/vfx guy around, but had shot some green screen stuff a while back. we shot on betasp but did the first rounds of keying bringing it in as DV for rough cuts. I did the keying in AE. the dv keys were TERRIBLE. awful.
Later I re-did them after digitizing from Beta to uncompressed 10bit. NIGHT AND DAY. for real. different experience. the keys came off mucho easier and much much cleaner.
combustion is the real deal, and after effects is the base bottom app to do keying. fcp? motion? hmm.
2cents
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sorry to ask this…
but can you explain the actual differenct between combustion and motion or after effects…
i know that they all are capable of different aspects…but many tools seem to overlap…so what is the best product and do i need all of them ? -
Keying DV is very difficult in Motion 2.0. PrimatteRT is a nice real-time keyer if you’re footage is uncompressed, horrible filter for DV. The best Motion 2.0 solution is dvMatte Blast for Motion ($100), or dvMatte Pro ($200 I think) from http://www.dvgarage.com. I’ve used dvMatte Blast and it’s much, much better dealing with DV originated footage, in addition to being “real-time” with no preview rendering.
You can also get dvMatte Pro for After Effects and FCP. After Effect’s Keylight is powerful, but it’ll take a good amount of tweaking to get something clean using DV25. I haven’t had much luck with Keylight so far, but I’m not an expert.
Combustion’s Discreet Keyer, or the Diamond Keyer in Combustion 4, is supposed to be really, really good. Worth trying if it’s handy; expensive if it isn’t handy.
Afraid I’ve concluded that DV25 keying isn’t worth the effort, and would rather shoot BetaSP, DV50, even HDV instead.
Mathew Schirado
West Michigan Animation & Effects Users Group
http://www.wmaeug.net -
Others have commented on DV keying solutions. While the following isn’t a solution to your keying issues, one other thing to remember – DON’T render the file in Motion. It’s better to import the Motion (or LiveType if using that) project into FCP and render within FCP. The Motion (or LiveType) clip can then be opened from within FCP (bin or timeline) for additional adjustments, saved, and the new changes will appear in FCP (sorta like edit/combusiton but a little different).
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