I need something that can do some quality-level chroma keying and matting. I currently have Adobe Premiere 5 but its chromakey falls far short of anything even remotely convincing. The edges of its mattes are horrifically obvious and look like a 1970's studio in the hands of 5-year-olds. The outlines sparkle like a bloody Christmas tree.
I would upgrade to Premiere Pro, but alas, I would also have to upgrade to Windows XP, which I don't have the money to do.
Is there anything out there that will give me high-quality mattes without me having to spring for a $500+ professional-level production suite. Anyone know of anything?
Chroma Key is more art than science. You might try changing the way you light the subject and background a bit. You might try putting a hat on to avoid the annoying hair halos or changing the color of a characters clothes or hair. Perhaps even filtering the light or changing the white balance to really set off the element to be keyed out. Also do not forget a backlight as this can help really set off the lines of the keyed out element from the background.
A lot of Chroma Key software lets you pick additional shades of a color so you can pick away at the edges bit by bit until you are happy.
RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA
RJSchwarz
As rj stated lighting is key. I am not familiar with your editing program but there should be some setting which you can adjust.
Also, make sure your subject is at least 3 feet from the green screen. The first couple I did were awful, but after some experimentation and practice things worked out well.
Good luck!
Learn how to do something new everyday!
The problem I'm having is that it doesn't know how to properly 'feather' a selection.
Thinking that the issue was with my lighting, I even tried keying a CGI image of a ball against a perfectly solid green background, with no shadows, and I still had the same problem.
It's not that the software can't find colors, it just doesn't know how to handle the antialiasing (which all video images have. it's what keeps them from appearing "blocky" like an old video game) where the background ends and the subject begins.
By example, let's just say you had a red cube sitting in front of a blue screen. In the area on the screen where the red cube edges touch the blue screen, if you look at the individual pixels, you'll see varying degrees of purple. An advanced keying program will know enough to make these pixels partially transparent, but mine only finds the pure blue. Increasing the "fuzziness" not only affects the purple, but also begins to make the cube translucent.
Now we're just talking about 'perfect' scenario with a pure red object on a pure blue object using pure white light. Modern keyers can actually handle a subject wearing a blue shirt that is merely a different shade from the background.
Perhaps if you name the software you are using someone can be more specific in how to help. Until then we're just guessing and giving you generic answers.
RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA
RJSchwarz
quote:
Originally posted by rjschwarz
Perhaps if you name the software you are using someone can be more specific in how to help. Until then we're just guessing and giving you generic answers.RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA
Adobe Premiere 5, I had it in the original post. More specifically, Premiere for Windows.
You did have it in the initial post, not sure how I missed it. My bad. Sorry about that.
I don't know much about Adobe Premier, I use Final Cut Pro but I can tell you my first attempts sounded very similar to what you're describing. I found tutorials on the web that explain how to remove the feathering and such by selecting additional colors or perfecting the input. I'm sure there are similar things out there for Premier if you look around.
RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA
RJSchwarz
So far all the standalone programs I've found that offer quality keying are $500+. And this includes Boris FX which has a superior keying plugin for Premiere, but that costs more than twice what even Premiere Pro 2.0 is worth ?xx(?
