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The color picker is a lie
I’m in the middle of a project at work where I have to key out over 20 of the stations talent and crew. In all my studies I have never come across a keying tutorial that didn’t tell you to use the color picker when selecting your key color. I will never touch the color picker again when it comes to keying. Manually choose your color. Start in status mode. Shift to green or blue and started sliding around the color palette’s saturation and lightness. You’ll find it’s insanely simple to find the sweet spots that will create the perfect keys. You also have control to shift the hue to avoid skin tones or articles of clothing that are giving you diffulty.
I found it was impossible to get anything better than okay results in status view when using the color picker. Using the pixel sampler preset I could get better results. Nothing like the results from just manually selecting the color.
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4 Replies
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Status view works the best. You see the changes in real time. If you’re in screen view than it goes low res as soon as you make a change. Final output doesn’t update at all.
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“Life Should Come With Backround Music”
-Brown Sugar Studios- -
and yes… I’m using keylight.
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“Life Should Come With Backround Music”
-Brown Sugar Studios- -
I tried it again on final output and screen view, they too allowed you to see the results in real time. Still, status view is the quickest.
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“Life Should Come With Backround Music”
-Brown Sugar Studios- -
This is probably because of noise in your footage. The color picker will only sample one pixel’s value. But that pixel may not be representative of the majority of the screen. Of course, this is just me theorizing 🙂
You could try applying a Median filter to your footage to smooth the noise out before using the Color Picker and see if that gives you better results. Of course you wouldn’t want to leave this Median filter on your footage after you pick the color value, it’s just a way you might be able to get a smoother color value from your screen.
Darby Edelen
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