Selecting background and foreground with Primatte Keyer

[Ryan Estabrooks]

Interestingly enough, I’m running into this same issue, which is kind of frustrating.

I’ve updated Red Giant Primatte to the latest version (5.1.9), running After Effects CC 2019 on Windows 10.

I don’t know how exactly the original poster was initially editing/altering footage in After Effects, but I’ve noticed it seems to have problems with footage that isn’t just straight up scaled at 100%. Basically, if you change the scale or add masks, it’s almost like it throws of what pixels Primatte is using when you select the Point/Rectangle method of selecting key colors.

The strange thing is – I tried pre-composing all of my footage that I tinkered with so that it’s just a simple 1920 x 1080 comp, scaled at 100% (so basically, as normal as can be). And yet, it still can’t seem to select any pixels. Using the eye dropper works for me too, but like they previously mentioned, the benefits of Primatte is being able to use the super precise tools to select foreground and background.

For example, here is footage that I masked (to only show the green screen area): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FpDI1FsKyCAIxPGN8Sb06En2rY97lY5P/view?usp=sharing

And yet, when I choose Point/Rectangle, then click “Select BG” an draw in the green screen, literally nothing happens.

Keylight doesn’t help much in this instance. We’re also using a much better keying tool on our Mac machines but our teammates who are Windows-only have access to just Primatte, which is why we’re trying to figure out what’s going on with this. I can’t get a grasp on how Primatte interprets exactly what it’s “seeing” when you pick background/foregrounds.

I went through the entire Primatte manual and haven’t gotten anything from Red Giant. Any ideas would be helpful. Thanks!

[Ryan Estabrooks]

This was on a big set of about 12 different TV screens with green on them. There was a lot going on with the set and the company who funded this wanted this to be included. Given the budget, set design, amount of people on stage, etc. we did the absolute best we could. Trust me, we discussed the setup of these screens for hours but ultimately, we had to move forward.

Keylight can do a pretty decent job of keying it out, it’s just not nearly as good as Primatte with separating foreground from background. When Primatte functions properly, it does an amazing job with this. It’s just for some reason, the more I’ve used it in After Effects, the more it doesn’t seem to function after you’ve resized footage, masked, pre-comped, etc. which is why I’m hoping to gain some insight into what exactly Primatte is seeing on screen vs. what is ACTUALLY on screen.