[Alan Helton]

That movie repair program DID work wonders on those MOVs. I had the same problems with files from an HPX-170. The earlier versions of OnLocation ruined more files than they gave me. It’s gotten a little better but all I can conclude is that OnLocation just sucks.

There should be a free program from Adobe that fixes these files. Or a better encoder for VLC, because that’s all that can open these files.

[Alan Helton]

My first fix for my first professional problem! I key out a lot of subjects with blacks and they always seem to turn out noisy. This fix also works with blues which often don’t turn out well over green (yellows over blue screens), and even weird instances when the green just won’t go away around the edges without making the inside look like mud.

A personal note: I HATE white and black clipping. It always turns my blacks to pitch black and never ends up looking good. I prefer the following method much more.

The key is to make an outside AND and inside matte. The outside is pretty easy. Simply key until green around the edges go away. Don’t worry about the inside for now.

Duplicate and precomp that layer. Go into the comp and set your keylight to “Screen Matte”. You will get the white on black matte along with the gray areas where parts of your subject are translucent. Of course, you will notice there are translucent parts to your black areas. Yuk. Dial your blance to make the matte as white as solid as possible.

Set “Screen Shrink/Grow” for the layer in your precomp to between -2 and -4. If not, you may end up with dark borders that don’t always look too neat in the end.

Go back to the main comp.

Jack up the highlights and jack down the shadows on your precomp layer so the gray areas disappear and you are left with a solid white shape.

Duplicate the original layer and delete its Keylight plugin. Set the new layer TrkMat to Luma for the pre-comp above it.

You now have an outer and inner matte for your subject! There are no longer any noisy blacks, blues are radiant and perhaps even some highlights came back too.

Set the blend mode for the middle layer to Luminosity to use the chroma values from the original layer. This will remove any green spill that may have snuck back onto your subject.
Good luck!