[Karen Pouye]

Thank you Steve for all your work. You managed to get the hair tamed down a lot more than I did. The rest of the issues are easily fixed… as you said by separate keys.

I think it comes down to the quality of the footage. I never thought about the 50fps….good thinking. I usually shoot in 25fps which may have helped avoid this previously.
Now that I know that it isn’t so much a keying issue I’ll focus on the capture again & try to improve that. I can resort to direct capture in 4:2:2, but it makes the process a bit more complicated & the files much bigger to handle.

One other possibility…my green screen lights are blue & my foreground lights red…could this cause weird effects do you think?
Again…thanks so much Steve for your help. I have spent days on this so your input & assistance is greatly appreciated.

[Karen Pouye]

I used a Sony VG20 which is a semi-pro DSLR video camera. I agree that there is a fair amount of noise. I found that when I was shooting, I had to flood the subject with considerable light because the camera is very poor in low light and the lens that is provided is a slow f4 zoom lens. I even had to resort to using gain because the 4 lights I used on the foreground were not enough (3 X 1200 LEDs + a red head with softbox). The green screen was independently lit with fluros.
Sony claims that because the sensor is so big, that it makes up for the slow lens…but I beg to differ. I can resort to using my fast prime lenses but they have no zoom.

[Karen Pouye]

I was going to go for white after I saw how clean it looked, but a colored background may be smarter in this instance to maybe hide some of the weakness. I did another video previous to this, where the hair caused the same problem and I used a background to distract, but it didn’t really achieve much.
I’ll find a background for you anyway.

[Karen Pouye]

Thanks Tero, I’ll give your suggestions a whirl. I tried just keying the top of the hair all on it’s own & I could not even get that happening. It just won’t stop moving even when I shrink the matte right back.

[Karen Pouye]

Well I have spent days trying every conceivable technique possible to eliminate the shimmering hair in my footage (not referring to the samples here) and I have been unable to reduce it significantly at all!

I don’t know what has caused it, but I think it is just too bad to chroma key.

If anyone wants to prove me wrong, here is some sample footage (50MBs)
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l53j8eh5oof7jko/AADdBqzuPibpX6jiiVxq8W_ia?dl=0

[Karen Pouye]

Hi Steve,
Thanks for all your advice & suggestions.
I think that the fast lens only helped in providing more light without the use of gain, although my testing results were not always consistent.
I will certainly try the dechatter effect and the techniques you suggested. I actually have 2 shoots that I was thinking of reshooting because of the shimmering problem. Maybe I’ll give your ideas a try…and maybe avoid having to reshoot (particularly as one of my actors is not available).

[Karen Pouye]

Thanks for the template Ciaran!
I probably do need to go back & do a few more tutorials on the keying process again as it’s been a while and it’s quite a complex process.
I must admit that I did try a few video tutorials, but they were extremely basic and it was a matter of them throwing in perfect footage and getting a fairly instant & perfect result.
Thanks for your help and suggestions.

[Karen Pouye]

Hi Steve,
Thanks for your suggestion. I will try it.
I did discover one more peculiar thing, which is that the variation in colors and shade are increased after uploading to YouTube. It seems that the encryption process used by You Tube does tend to exaggerate the contrast making the variations more prominent.

[Karen Pouye]

Thanks Ty Ford. I was looking at the 77b (I can actually get it cheaper than the 55b and it’s smaller) but I was told it was “transparent” meaning that it picks up more background sound.
I was using the Sony UWP C1 kit and strangely, it was perfect in that it picked up no other noise but the speaker. These are very hard to get now as they have been replaced by the UWP V1 which may not be as good for my purpose. (BTW I live in Australia so the C1 is legal here).