[Pete Burger]

What came to my mind right now:
If you are working with CS5 you can work with the native T2i footage, if you are working with CS4 or earlier, you might want to transcode your footage to Neoscene or DNxHD, to be able to work at all with VDLSR footage in Premiere 😉
AVID DNxHD can be downloaded for free from the AVID site and be used in any NLE. Neoscene seems to be an even better codec, but it’s not free.
Transcoding can be done with MPEG Streamclip, which is capable of resizing your footage while transcoding. I can’t say anything about the quality of the resized clips, since I do transcoding in full-res, but this might be an option too.

All the best!

[Pete Burger]

I wouldn’t claim to be a greenscreen-expert, but I did quite a lot of keying the last couple of years, and in my experience, it’s a lot easier, the softer/blurrier the background is.

The hardest footage to key – at least for me – is always footage, where either the screen isn’t lit evenly and/or you can see the structure of the screens fabric.
In After Effects there even are presets, to blur the greens or blues for keying.

The only reason I can think of, why not to use “blur”, is when choosing you DOF too shallow, so that you not only blur the background but also the “edges” of your talent. This can give you a very hard time in keying.

[Pete Burger]

Glad, I helped!

[Pete Burger]

I am working with the XDCam EX 1080p settings, which work pretty good. But Premiere CS4 has problems with the native T2i files, so it’s best to transcode them before editing into Cineform or AVID DNxHD.

[Pete Burger]

When editing in a 720p project, scaling the full-res clips down directly after putting them in the timeline, you could end up having a lot of “downsize-render-time” while editing. And that sums up pretty quickly.

I think you’d be faster in editing, when working in full-res and scale down with Media Encoder.

Good thing with editing in a 720p project with 1080p footage is the possibility to reframe every clip.

[Pete Burger]

It’s definitly not as good as 4:2:2 footage, but it works pretty well. Key (no pun intended) for any kind of chroma-keying work is an evenly, well lit green- or bluescreen. Footage itself IMHO is secondary. You can achieve good results even with DV footage.
With the shallow DOF of your DSLR and a fast lens you can bring your background out of focus and that will help pretty much with keying.
Did a lot of greenscreen work for a shortfilm, that was shot on a 5DMkII recently. Had no problems at all with After Effects and Keylight.

[Pete Burger]

Never did sharpening in video before.
Tested it right now and – wow – really gives a punch! Thanks again Phil! And thanks Robbie for the denoising tip!
Fooled around a bit with the “unsharp mask” filter that I use a lot in Photoshop. And for my taste it produces even better results, because you have more control over the amount of sharpening and what is to be sharpend.

[Pete Burger]

Thanks, Richard! Will try it!

[Pete Burger]

Thank you, Michael!

[Pete Burger]

The Canon files are a bit tricky to work with natively. If you don’t have CS5, the best way is to transcode them into an intermediate codec like DNxHD or Cineform and then edit them with the XDCAM EX preset (i.e. XDCAM EX 1080p 24).
I use MPEG Streamclip for transcoding into DNxHD (Export to Quicktime -> AVID DNxHD Codec (Quality 100%), chosing the options and fps that’ll fit my footage, deselecting “interlaced”).
You can download the DNxHD codec for free from the AVID site.
Haven’t tried Cineform yet, but from what I read, it seems to be a very good and stable solution.

For DVD- or BluRay-output you can use Media Encoder/Encore, which will give you good quality. Or you can export to DNxHD / Cineform for maintaining highest quality and convert those files with another DVD/BluRay encoder.

HTH