What is the best Keyer for Premiere Pro CS4?

[Vince Becquiot]

Primatte is one of my favorites. However, it’s mostly an After Effects toy. While you might get it to work in Premiere, it will be likely frustrating as many functions won’t work. The premiere interface also doesn’t lend itself well for compositing.

And finally, for good keying, you need masks, not available in Premiere.

The workflow I prefer is copying and pasting clips between Premiere and After Effects, then rendering back out and replacing in Premiere.

You can copy clips from PP project panel to After Effect panel, but also from premiere timeline to After effects composition.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Alan Lloyd]

What kind of keying? Greenscreen? Luminance? Difference matte?

I can often manage a decent greenscreen key in PPro simply by lighting it well (scopes are your best friends here) and careful tweaking. I even did a nice luma key this week for a client by using a locked-down camera and stopping down to grab enough footage out the otherwise blown-out window to composite it – in PPro, without touching After Effects. Took a few layers and a little twiddling, but it worked.

[Richard Stegall]

I guess I will just stick with Primatte in AE. The workflow is just so much better in PP. Thanks for all of the input. I just want to make sure there wasnt a better option than using AE.

[David b. Monier-williams]

I have a Greenscreen clip in my CS4 project. I have white curly hair. I applied 25% similarity. It still leaves me with a slight green halo around my head, instead of my usual gold one. It also leaves a slight green halo around my blue blazer. Using Blend, Threshold, Smoothing doesn’t seem to help. I’m an AE ignoramus. What to do?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,

David