[Michael Parks]

Ann,

We’ve used virtual sets for quite a few projects over the past two years. For keying, we have tried everything that comes with FCP, AfterEffects, and some others. With good footage, they are all generally OK. When we had a really tough project (bad footage), we couldn’t get good results with anything we tried…until we tried Ultimatte AdvantEdge. Do a google search for ‘ultimatte free demo plugin’ to get the link to the free demo version. It solved our problem on that project very well. We then started using it for “good” footage, too. It does a great job (better than anything else we’ve tried) on that, too. We often get footage that we didn’t shoot (screwed up footage), so it’s important to have a keying plugin that is very robust.

For virtual sets, I’m sure that you have seen many of the “download now for $199” web sites. Those are OK for our very low budget clients, but the sets often look very low budget (sometimes very cheezy) when you actually start to use them with your footage. That’s often OK for some (very low budget) projects.

When we have a project that absolutely must look great, we’ve used virtualsets.com They are much more expensive (think thousands, not hundreds), but their stuff looks great (great lighting, high realism). They also customize everything for you (logos, graphics, camera angles). Everything we have gotten from them lately was HD, so that shouldn’t be a problem, either.

Hope this helps!

-Mike