Chroma key problem

Hi,
I am preparing for shooting a film in which I have 7 minutes scene in the car with lots of dialogues so it will be much easier with the green screen. But there lies a problem. Actors are smoking all the time. And that smoke cause me a problem.
I will probably shoot on HDV but I`ve tested it on DV and used a keylight in After Effects. The result on people satisfied but the smoke doesn`t exist. It`s eaten by keylight.
Does anyone have a solution? Maybe with different chroma key? It would help me a lot.
Thanks,
Zare

First off all, DV is the worst way to plan to shoot and test keying. Keylight hates DV footage and you will never get a decent key. If you are shooting HD, you should have no problem with your smoke wisps. But if that is a concern, why smoke in the first place? Is it vital to the story? If not, don't smoke.

[Tom Scott] "Rubbish!!"

I have pulled many a fine key using client supplied DV footage. The point I was trying to make is that why use DV as a test when you are planning HD shoot. Two different worlds and Keylight will handle HD footage a gazillion times better than DV. I also wonder how much you charge a client for the "effort" of spending hours dealing with crappy green screen shots on DV...

I found this online:

You should give DVMatte from DV Garage a try. I'm working on a show right now with a lot of greenscreen shot on DX100's and it gives great results for keys. DV is a different animal when it comes to keying due to the specific compression, and DV Matte was made to specifically address this problem. They have a demo you could try out.

While you can pull "decent" keys from DV footage, you will never be able to get "perfect" keys from it, even with the Keylight plugin (as good as that keyer is). It's simply an inherent problem with the 4:1:1 sampling of DV that causes (i.e. color is sampled with 4 times less resolution than luminance) colors to appear blocky, and you'll get awful stair-stepping on you keyed edges if you aren't aware of this.

DV Matte Pro is a good plugin, but it's been pretty much obsoleted by Keylight, and you can get much better results than DV Matte Pro by feeding Keylight a properly "pre-treated" source.

You can perform this "pre treatment" in AE (basically a chroma smoothing operation which a plugin like DV Matte does internally) by duplicating your clip over itself, and then precomping both layers into a single new comp. Then, on the top clip in the precomp, add a Fast Blur (or any blur filter that lets you specify the direction of the blur...you want to blur in a vertical direction only) of around 0.3 to 0.5 pixels.

Then, change the blend/transfer mode for the top layer to "Color". You wont see a difference with the naked eye, but when you go back to your main comp, and then apply Keylight to the precomp, you'll get *dramatically* cleaner edges on your keys than if you simply applied it to an untreated clip.

Another tip, regarding your bluescreen: DON'T USE A BLUESCREEN!

Blue is the worst backing color you can use when keying from DV sources. Most of the time, the blue channel of an image has the most noise in it (which you can clearly see by clicking the blue color chip at the bottom of your AE comp window), which makes it really difficult to key fine detail like hair, reflections, shadows or any type of transparency, without getting ugly "mosquito" artificating in these areas. Add that to the fact that the color resolution in your DV clip is inherently low to begin with, and you'll find the whole keying process to be a huge pain in the ass. This is one of many reasons why most professional keying pipelines insist on using greenscreens.

The only time where a blue screen might be preferable is when you're shooting talent has very light hair color, and a blue screen gives more contrast for the keyer to work with. Since you're just shooting inanimate objects, however, it's wise to stick with green.

Also, while creating a garbage matte is good, you also should create what's called a "holdout" or "foreground matte", which basically does what a garbage matte does, but on the foreground image instead. The trick to good keying is concentrating *only* on the edges of your FG subject. Don't try to tweak the keying plugin to completely eliminate your background screen (even if the BG is garbage matted) while keeping the FG solid, because you'll rarely get optimal results that way. The holdout matte tells the keyer what should be considered 100% foreground, and it will ignore anything within that area when keying the image.

The drawback to this method, of course, is that all the green/blue spill from the screen is retained in the areas defined by the holdout matte, but at least the keyer isnt keying out this spill, eating holes in your FG object. Remember that it's much easier to colorcorrect/despill your keyed FG after the fact than it is to fix funky/overly-soft/choked edges caused by an overzealous keyer trying to work on the entire image.

Good luck!!!

"[Todd Morgan] "Keylight hates DV footage and you will never get a decent key."

[Tom Scott] Rubbish!! I've managed to get some pretty decent keys, using Keylight on DV footage."

I think the key phrase here is "pretty decent". Perhaps your standards for "pretty decent" are somewhat low. I'd like to direct you to the following URL:
http://macbreak.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=70596

Download the file, "macbreak20060303-001b-mp4.mov ". This is an episode of the MacBreak series of podcasts called "The Road to 1080p Part 2". It's hosted by Alex Lindsay, who additionally just happens to own DV Garage and run an organization called the Pixel Corps. Watching this podcast could be one of the more instructive 12 minutes you'll spend in the next year.

In this podcast you will find a very thorough and not overly-technical demonstration of a concept called Color Resolution. You'll see a very clear explanation of the differences among 4-4-4, 4-2-2 and 4-1-1 color resolutions. You'll also learn exactly why DV is probably the WORST thing you can try to key.

As you watch, keep in mind that Alex Lindsay, the podcast's host, actually SELLS software to key DV video, and he still doesn't think much of DV!

If after watching the podcast you are still convinced that DV is just as good as anything else when chroma keying, you'll never be dissuaded from your belief.

Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA

I have had success in keying DV footage with keylight, sometimes you need to pull more than one key. (Most of the time I should say) After you pull the key you can just go back and use a particle generator to put the smoke back in.

dangerd