[Christopher Meurer]

I agree. This was a special case where I had sooo many difficult edges on my talent that I needed to make sure my green background was flawless and I find that for me anyway, Color is quick and easy and offers more control to select specific colors. Also Color will spit out 10 bit ProRes where as my source was 8 bit DVCPRO HD. Normally, I do follow the conventional workflow of pulling the key from the raw footage.

…in the words of Matthew McConaughey…j.k. livin!

[Christopher Meurer]

Thanks for the thoughts guys, I appreciate it! I am definitely going to pick up a copy of Shake since it’s so cheap. (plus everyday I’m constantly pushing myself further and further outside of my niche, more skills=more work=more opportunity to be creative) Last question about this topic and then I’m letting it rest.
How do you guys feel about Conduit from DV Garage? That’s what I’ve been using for a few years and it’s been great. I feel like it really has some build from scratch capabilities. It’s great… until you run into a special case scenario and have no resources to help you find out how to accomplish the task you need to accomplish. Let’s use, as an example, the job I’m on now. Talent was shot head to toe in front of green screen, professionally lit on a large studio cyc. Talent is wearing crazy copper colored costumes all shiny and reflective, they have crazy 80’s hair swirling everywhere and are wearing red boots that come off to the camera as super saturated and reflective. On top of it all they are dancing so now we are adding a lot of motion to the mix. I have a lot of experience shooting green screen and this raises nearly every red flag but unfortunately after many attempts all of these costume nightmares are not up for negotiation, so after a few, nay, many curses in my head towards the man in charge aka client, we shoot and I go get busy in the edit bay. To make a long story short, after a trip through Color adding multiple secondaries including one for these ridiculous red boots, I’m off to Motion where I use the Conduit plugin to successfully key everything (even the crazy hair) everything…. except those damn red boots. The boots have a Halo around them and I don’t want to sacrifice my whole key to get these things perfect. So based on my research and limited knowledge I come up with the idea to combine my matte with another matte limited to just the boots and choke the matte only on that portion of the image. My biggest issue is that I can’t find any in depth tutorials on advanced compositing using Conduit (hence my interest in Shake) Are there any books out there that really go into detail about Channel Separation and Edge Blur and Combining a dozen Mattes or do I need to find the guy in the back alley with the secret handshake? Even a book on compositing theory would be great. Fyi the client is more than happy with the results I’ve come up with for this project but I’m one of those guys that wants my work to always shine if nothing more than to know how to get past this if it ever comes up again.

Thank Again!

…in the words of Matthew McConaughey…j.k. livin!