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Rough Keys on Set
For an upcoming greenscreen shoot on HDCAM I wanted to look into some options of pulling rough keys on set to show the art director. The production company is shooting on an F-900. My plan is to have the camera record the entire shoot to tape, but at the same run HDSDI output from the camera into an ioHD which would be hooked upto a MacBook Pro. That way I could pull select setups and capture them on the fly and just do some rough comps on set with keylight in After Effects so that the art director can see how the background plates are lining up. I want to see if this is a viable option and also ensure that nothing about this would affect the in-camera recording. Also if there are other hardware solutions that people have used on set to accomplish a similar task I’d be interested in hearing them. I’m sure there are plenty of ways to accomplish this, in this case I was trying to satisfy the art director and not increase the cost of the production budget too much for the agency. Any info is appreciated. Thanks!
– Mike
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4 Replies
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There’s an AJA io forum for this, but I’ll answer here.
The answer is yes and I have done this many times on set. The ioHD is perfect for this and so is AE and keylight. You can pull a rough key in a very short amount of time, and if you’re really clever you can pull a good key in a short amount if time. I think this is a very viable option providing that it doesn’t need to be instantaneous. If you have AE CS4, it’s pretty fast on intel machines.
It will not effect in camera recording at all and actually you will probably be able to pull better looking keys from the direct capture material than form tape. Tape will have thin raster 8 bit compression and when you use the ioHD, you will be capturing the 10 bit HD SDI signal into a 10 bit full raster compressed codec (ProRes or ProRes HQ) with audio video and even time code.
Use AJA VTR Exchange to capture you material as FCP cannot handle the time code part of the equation on a non controllable device.
Jeremy
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Thanks Jeremy – very good to know. That’s a great tip on VTR exchange vs. FCP. So basically I’m just installing VTR Exchange on my laptop and setting my codec and input through the AJA interface (I’ve never used it before) – I assume it has something equivalent to “Capture Now” in FCP?
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[Mike Zimbard] “I assume it has something equivalent to “Capture Now” in FCP?”
Sure does. You can do it a nmber of ways through key commands or hit the buttons on the interface. Make sure to go to Window > Big Button to have some fun.
Write back with any questions.
Jeremy
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Will do – thanks very much!
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