[Paul Mcdonald]

What are you trying to remove?

[Paul Mcdonald]

This has the potential to look kind of rubbish and involve lots and lots of work, so if you do go ahead with it try and shoot material to make your job as easy as possible.

I’d prep a bunch of cardboard cards with four tracking dots, and drop them out of frame quickly to move to the next card (rather than putting them to the back of the pile). You minimize your difficult tracking that way – you can get away with lots over a few heavily motion-blurred frames. I’m also guessing you’re shooting on a consumer camera so stay away from any keying of colored board. Keep the board as flat as possible and stay well away from too much bending on its surface as this is pretty painful to hand track.

Keep it simple and you may get some reasonable clean results. Its a big ask to pull that off PLUS learn a new program though. After Effects can do everything you ask though.

[Paul Mcdonald]

I’m getting EXACTLY the problem described in the original post. All the variables are the same. A few of us at work have had a look at all my settings and I’m not so sure its just operator error.

In AE CS4 I bring in my source footage (16×9 Uncompressed 10bit progressive material), interpret it correctly, do my keying using Keylight 1.1, and render out using my standard uncompressed export module. In this case I wanted to render out the keyed material as both RGB plate on black and separate greyscale transparency matte. The material looks fine in my comp, well as fine as my keys usually look! – no fields and clean key edges. When I hit render it renders out at half resolution. The edges go to pieces bigtime. I also tried the Animation+ option with identical results. The render looks this way when I bring it into FCP and interpret it correctly.

I don’t get this issue if I have a solid behind my keyed footage. If I reduce the opacity of that solid it comes back. I also tried to cheat it by remapping the key to the RGB channels, adding a black solid behind the now greyscale key and rendering that out as a lumakey but no luck – the quality drops on render.

I’ve triple checked all my output settings. Quality is best, resolution full and field render off. We’re at a loss to understand what it causing it. We only recently upgraded to CS4 and did not have any issues with prior versions. I think Keylight is somehow causing or related to the issue – I rendered out 32bit material the other day with no issue. Love to hear other peoples take on the problem.