[Sylvia Porter]

Paco,

I’ve keyed the first pic…with the two actors. And honestly the edges are actually quite clean. However, the actor who is moving obviously will be difficult to separate from the background without microsurgery on the background (at least with this pic). The other actor (on the right) has some green splotches in his shirt, which no matter what will be transparent…again, you can perform a little surgery on those spots (change the colors of some pixels)…it will work. As for the second shot (with the one actor) I’d suggest using a couple of Three-way color corrector applications to get the color of the green screen separated from his hair, and get the green shades to match as much as possible. There’s also a line behind him. Work on that in Photoshop, or After Effect…get rid of that line. Then you will be able to key it, with several applications of the Chroma Key. These aren’t going to be excellent keys…but they are doable as stills…though changing frames will present its own set of issues. The amount of time that you put into it will come back to you with a profound understanding of what to do next time for a cleaner keyable background, but also how to master (not just use superficially) the tools available in Premiere and other applications.

And good for you, in doing something like this. You’ll learn a lot more than you would in any college class or tutorial on keying, if you work on this and actually stick it out to the end with intelligent attention to the capacities of each tool.

Okay, I actually just keyed both stills, and the only real problem was the one actors combing arm. Other than that, and the green in the shirt, perfect. This is not to say that in a moving video, it would be the same, but if your goal is a little bit cheezy, I’m sure it would be cheezier than a news broadcast.

Oh, also garbage matte out as much as you can before you start keying (meaning put your garbage matte over your chroma keys)…you may have to key frame that matte and that’s a little bit of work too. But if you have the time, go for it.

I also think that if all someone can say is “you can’t do it,” they should really not bother responding to a post. I see that way too often.