Re: Good green screen workflow

FCPs keyers are more user friendly, but I'm not convinced they're necessarily better than the tools that Motion offers -- the bezier masks alone make Motion's ability to tweak a bit stronger. However, the Motion workflow is too slow and laborious to be the go-to app for keying in my opinion.

On a daily basis, I am keying footage shot from less-than-ideal blue screen setups. Our source material is often full of noise, underexposed, and contains lots of problem areas (shadows, wrinkles, etc). Over time, I compared keyers in FCP, Motion, and AE to see what yielded the best results... and in the end, decided to purchase Primatte Keyer Pro from Red Giant. It squashes all these others hands down. It's 4x slower to render than FCPs keyer, but it does things beyond FCPs limits. It is slightly on the pricey side, but worth it.

Last note: taking steps to color correct clips either in Color or using FCPs Color Corrector 3-Way (w/ Limit Effect) before to prep the clips helps tremendously. I color correct, then export, then key the newly color corrected clip. It's easier to hone in on your ranges when the clips have been treated to give you more handle room.

"The deepest blues are black" - Foo Fighters
(this doesn't help me when I'm chroma keying!)