What Bogie says is right. What Kevin says is right, too.
If you have no other choice but to chroma key in HDV, you'll pretty much have to resign yourself to crummy-looking edges on your keys, as Bogie says. Why? HDV has lousy color resolution. It's just as bad as DV's color resolution. So what's color resolution, anyways? Watch this podcast and learn what you're up against:
http://macbreak.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=70596
And to elaborate on Kevin's "don't use the HDV codec" admonition, here's why:
Dave's Stock Answer #1:
If the footage you imported into AE is
any kind of the following -- footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 -- you need to convert it to a different codec.
These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.
In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
