Re: How to capture video best for keying

you could probably better specifics for capturing in premiere in the premiere forum, but in general, for keying in ae, hdv is about as bad as it gets codec-wise.

hdv has heavy compression of it's color components, which is really bad for keying. plus, it uses inter-frame compression, which is really bad for working in ae.

since you are capturing via firewire (i assume firewire400), the best codec you may be able to use is dvcprohd (also called dvcpro100), but i don't know how that works in premiere. i do know that starting with cs3, there is native support of panasonic's p2 media and that uses the dvcprohd codec, so you may be able to set premiere up with p2 settings to capture to dvcprohd.

the advantage of dvcprohd is that it will give you better color sampling (more color data to work with in keying) and it only uses intra-frame compression, which works much better in ae.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW