Source is DV sd... I couldn't work on the original capture so I had them to transfer me the rush via the ProRes codec ( QT animation wasn't possible, slow servers and conections )
I'm very unsastified with the results as you can see below.
I made 3 keys ( clothes, head left and right )
I think I tried everything, deartificating and denoising helped a lot but its still not enough... Every techniques or keyers I used destroyed the small amount of hair he had left.
Re: Yet another impossible key by Alan Okey on Oct 19, 2009 at 6:52:44 pm
Your source footage is terrible, therefore the results are guaranteed to be disappointing. If a good key was important to the client, they should have shot the talent against a proper green screen (not blue) using a proper format (not DV). I'm frankly surprised that your key looks as good as it does given the source material. Nice work.
Re: Yet another impossible key by Dave LaRonde on Oct 19, 2009 at 7:06:15 pm
Actually, that's a good-looking key, considering the poor lighting -- it is absolutely HORRIBLE -- and that it was shot on DV.
Whether the chroma key background is blue or green is largely irrelevant. The reason green is typically preferred is because most cameras use the green channel for the luminance part of the picture. But with good-looking video, it doesn't make all that much of a difference.
Does shooting on DV really make that much of a difference? It certainly does! DV has abysmal color resolution. If you've never heard of color resolution before, you should watch this podcast, which gets into the issue of color resolution:
After you're done watching it, keep in mind that PAL DV's 4-2-0 color resolution is just as bad as NTSC's 4-1-1 color resolution. Shooting with HDV is just as bad.
Shooting with something that has 4-2-2 color resolution, like the Panasonic HVX 200 P2 camera, is pretty good.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Re: Yet another impossible key by Dumeyni Arnaud on Oct 20, 2009 at 8:42:14 am
Thanks for the positive feedback :)
This interview was important and as Alan said, it looked like they didn't cared about it. But since I wasn't involved in the shooting I couldn't tell them they were doing it wrong, is it always like that ?
Nice link Dave, I heard about the 4-2-0 color but now I understand why it looks horrible even in HDV.
Downloaded demo of chromakey from boris, will try.
I've been playing with Primatte and garbage mattes with the head, the inward defocus helps, but I got a weird dark green color on his hair, pic related :
Looking at the source footage his hair is already a little green, so maybe it just a color correction problem and not spill.
