[Annaël Beauchemin]

forget about it… you will never get a good key out of a picture like that. The picture is very desaturated and the luminance value of the wall is the same as the guy’s shirt and hair.

You could roto him, but it would be easier to just reshoot with a properly lit greenscreen.

[Annaël Beauchemin]

[Dave LaRonde] “It’s challenging enough to pull a flawless key from a properly lit green screen shot. Trying to pull a key from white, 49 times out of 50, will be an excercise in futility. I almost think it’s more cruel to hold out false hope that a luma key is going to cut it.”

Luma keys can work pretty well for sky replacements. When the sky is overexposed and the subjects are properly exposed, I find them even easier than a chroma key.

FlashEng1, if you can, post a picture of one frame of your clip so we can tell you if you’re wasting your time or not.

One other method to luma key is to duplicate the layer and create a B/W matte out of it. For this you desaturate the layer using a Hue/Saturation effect, and then add a Levels or Curve effect. You then crush the blacks and the whites. Your subject should now become a BW silhouette: this is your matte. The advantage of this technique is that you can work within a single color channel (either R, G, or B) which may have a better contrast than the merged RGB channel (this is true especialy with skies).

This method is called procedural mattes. There is few a good tutorials on the net if you google “procedural matte”.

like this one: https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/onneweer_barend/keyingtut/index.html

[Annaël Beauchemin]

Twixtor does not seem to remove the pulldown before slowing down, so the movement is still jerky. They also have a pulldown remover plugin, but either it cannot be used in conjunction with Twixtor, or then i’m missing something..

I’ll look into a demo Boris optical flow, this one escaped my list!

thanx

[Annaël Beauchemin]

Here’s a try with Sapphire’s Soft focus, which is a combination of a slight luma blur and heavier chroma blur.

[Annaël Beauchemin]

[CharlieX2] “It’s a surefire way to get you into BIG trouble. “

This is my experience too. On projects that requires lots of modifications inside the nest, I always end up having to refresh the nest manually because it won’t update. This is especially frustrating with audio, because when you do a subtle gain change for example, it’s really hard to guess if FCP updated the nest correctly.

It seems to me that the problem occur most often with projects in which I have multiple versions of the same sequence. Usualy deleting the renders in the older sequences fixes the problems, sometimes not…

[Annaël Beauchemin]

thanx. I was about to uninstall everything, so you saved myself 2 or 3 hours.

this is yet another reason why keyframes are a big pain to use in FCP…

[Annaël Beauchemin]

what I do is to delete clips one by one. When a clip is used in a sequence, FCP will pop up a dialog saying the the clip is a Masterclip and blah blah. Hit cancel. If it’s not used in any sequence, it will be deleted without any warning.

Of course, if you have thousands of clips, this will be a pain…

[Annaël Beauchemin]

[Carl] “AVID DS is NOT a NLE (although you can edit on it)

Avis DS has NEVER BEEN intended to be an NLE. It must be Terrible to edit a long project on it.

Is a compositing/finishing app more related to Flame or even After Effects than to AVID and it comes from the Canadian Softimage family, not from the Media Composer’s. “

wow… what a load of BS. Either you have never used DS or you have not used it for long enough.
Avid DS is a really good editor. I would even dare to say that I prefer it to both MC and FCP. I don’t have lots of experience on MC, tho. The only thing that makes it a bit poor for offline type of work is the limited media management (which has some very wise features but some major shortcomings at the same time). As far as hardware goes, DS has used many different video cards since v1, and ATI FireGL has been one of them. https://www3.softimage.com/avidds/default.asp?url=/DS/default.asp

And btw, FCP does have a great titler, it’s Boris Title 3D and it’s been included for a while now. It doesn’t let you see the background when typing, but who really cares except in discussions like this one…

[Annaël Beauchemin]

Silhouette roto is top class. Even better than the symphony animatte.

[Annaël Beauchemin]

there are a few plugins out there that give better slowmo with the ability to ramp speed, but I find they are clunky to work with in FCP.

And as far as I know, none of them has the ability to do a reverse pulldown when dealing with 24p footage in a 29.97 timeline. This makes 24p footage a big pain to slow down in FCP.