Re: Another related query

[Tatha] "Is it necessary, when using high-end keyers such as Keylight, Primatte or Advantedge, to do the routine preprocessing that is advisable with more basic keyers, e.g. look for the right high-contrast channel, apply levels appropriately etc etc.?"

These techniques are essentially producing a luminance extraction. Instead of simply using a desaturated clip to derive the matte, you look at various channels to see if any give you a better head start. FYI, another great plug-in to help with this is ReVisionFX Smooth Kit... they have options to seperate true luminance/chroma differential (ie. YUV). Primatte, Keylight, Ultimatte, and other "chroma keyers" are basing their extraction on color instead of luminance, so the channel shifting process is not necassary. These are really designed to handle green/blue screen extractions, and usually luminance keys work better when dealing with extractions from a regular shot.


[Tatha] "2) Anyone use DVMatte from DVgarage?"

I have used it and it works great. I wouldn't think about bailing all of my other keyers for it, since you can never have too many keyers. I have had shots where Primatte, Advantedge, and Keylight all failed, and AE's built-in Color Range keyer saved the day. I personally use Primatte for the majority of my keys, and turn to the others when it fails. DV Matte Pro is very good at dealing with 4:1:1 DV source, since it does a luminance key for the edges (4:1:1 has a full range of luma) and a chroma key for the base, and combines them together into a final key. I recently tried it on tough underexposed greenscreen shot on film, and it choked like all of the other keyers... I extracted it in minutes using the new flame Master Keyer. Master Keyer can probably tempt me to throw away all of my other keyers, but I can't carry around a flame like I can my Powerbook, so I will keep the others. MasterKeyer pulls a base key, then you can add three secondary patches which all get processed individually then output to one final matte. The interface is really exceptional, and I was able to pull the final matte in about five minutes (had about 80% extracted with abother two days of cleanup in Commotion). What was even more remarkable was that it rendered the 12bit 2k matte in 17 seconds on our new 4 proc SGI Tezro. =)

And regarding the "ILM" thing... it was actually developed by a talented programmer named Ben Svyersen (sp.), then Alex Lindsay (former ILM artist) took over sales/marketing/distribution when he saw how cool it was.