Terrible Green Screen Results

[Simon Roughan]

Hi Dave,
and thanks as usual for your time and input.
I have been using AE for many years, and have never ever ever been able to get good results from keylight, without a monumental amount of pissing about.
Even though that footage is shot with a good camera and a very good lens, in a TV studio, the noise in the (original) pic is for me totally unnacceptable. I have done every keylight tutorial, read every discussion thread, tried every technique, and it still looks noisy and crappy.
Heres the steps that I took with this piece of footage.
bottom layer: crunched it with curves, used remove noise with minimal settings to smooth out the jacket a bit.
Duplicate the layer. Apply keylight. set to screen matte. fiddle around a bit and get a good black/white matte. Use this layer as a Luma matte for the bottom layer.
Duplicate bottom layer again, put it on top, and then mask around the problem area of his glasses arms.
On top, an adjustment layer with channel mixer used as a spill suppressor, and with a “darken” blend mode.
It doesnt matter wether I use this method (layer as luma matte), or with keylight set to intermediate results, or final results, or anything at all. All grey or darker areas have noise and grain. Lots of the edge as well.
Its driving me crazy.
mfg
Simon

You know I’m born to lose, and gambling is for fools, but that’s the way I like it, baby. I don’t want to live forever!

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

For some reason I can’t connect o the link you provided to download the footage. However, there’s a trick that always works for me with Keylight- use the Intermediate Result, not the final. Add your own Spill Suppressor and you should be golden, no more noise.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Simon Roughan]

Hi Ted,
thanks for taking the time.
The server is down, therefore no more active link. And I have tried “Intermediate”, but as I wrote upstairs, nothing helps.
I ended up doing the basic keying in premiere with Ultrakey, then through dynamic link tweaking in AE.
I now have something that is acceptable. But I wish for once that it worked like it does in tutorials, where they click and its perfect.
mfg
Simon

You know I’m born to lose, and gambling is for fools, but that’s the way I like it, baby. I don’t want to live forever!

[Joey Trimmer]

I share your frustration with KeyLight. I always have a better initial result with Premiere’s UltraKey. I think Dave’s Alpha matte technique is worth a shot though. Otherwise, changing your workflow to key in Premiere and then bring the sequences into After Effects is another way to go. Good luck!

“I’m your density. I mean, your destiny.” – George McFly

[Simon Roughan]

Oh Dave, if you had any experience of my technical colleagues, you would understand why I laughed out loud when I read that…

You know I’m born to lose, and gambling is for fools, but that’s the way I like it, baby. I don’t want to live forever!

[Todd Kopriva]

Not that it helps you now, but that’s why we created the Key Cleaner effect:
https://bit.ly/AE_CC_next_details

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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