How do I key out this frizzy hair?
by Christopher Targia
on
Oct 29, 2009 at 3:20:39 pm
So I have been keying out this interviews on a green screen for some time now without to much of an issue, but yesterday we interviewed this lady and holy crap her frizzy hair is a nightmare! How would I go about keying something like this? The usual techniques don't seem to work, even if i key out some of her hair, the edges are all shaky and it looks crazy.
Re: How do I key out this frizzy hair? by Jason Diebler on Oct 29, 2009 at 4:03:56 pm
Frizzy hair can definitely be a problem, but there are a lot of steps you can take to improve your end result.
In studio: you may want to create more distance between subject/bkgd. I can still see the grain in the canvas. Also, a bit more light on the subject is needed. Under the scopes, it looks a bit low in your midtones and highlights. Of course, this doesn't help you much since this is all afterthought, so...
In post: I would prep this footage in Color (or w/ the 3-Way at the very least). Try to bring your midtones/highlights up, while maintaining good contrast. If you can iso the green range, you can give a lift to the greens altogether. It will help to color correct your footage before you attempt to key.
Plugins: The FCP chroma keyer or color key filters are probably not suitable to give you the best key you want. I encountered this same type of problem w/ frizzy hair and had no choice but to purchase a 3rd party keyer. With research, I went with the Primatte Keyer Pro plug-in from Red Giant. I tested this against all of FCPs native keyers, as well as the keyers in Motion and Keylight in AE. Primatte Keyer Pro will handle this frizzy hair... you may want to look into it.
"The deepest blues are black" - Foo Fighters
(this doesn't help me when I'm chroma keying!)
Re: How do I key out this frizzy hair? by Mark Suszko on Oct 29, 2009 at 4:40:06 pm
If this is in a DV25 timeline, bump this section into a higher rez format for starters. Color correct it first, then re-try the keyers. Don't try to do it all in one keying pass. Crop or use the multipoint garbage mask matte tool to cut closely around the woman's body, so the keyer has a shorter range to have to work over. When sampling the green, pick a spot close to the hair. Use some of the spill-killer filter. You may want to try adding some soft shadow as well.
Re: How do I key out this frizzy hair? by John Fishback on Oct 29, 2009 at 5:51:31 pm
What Mark said. Isolate areas with mattes and adjust each key to that area's particular challenges. And be sure to feather the edges. You may end up with many instances of the keyer.
Note that Motion includes a lite version of the Primatte keyer. While it's not as powerful as the Pro version, IMHO it's better than FCP's keyer.
John
MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24" TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
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Re: How do I key out this frizzy hair? by Dave LaRonde on Oct 29, 2009 at 5:47:42 pm
[Christopher Targia]"How would I go about keying something like this?"
One thing's for sure: you DONT want to use the keyers in FCP to do the job! Did you try it in Motion, which has a far better keyer than anything in the stock version of FCP?
But even that may not be enough....
[Mark Suszko]"If this is in a DV25 timeline, bump this section into a higher rez format for starters..."
You might THINK it would help, but it doesn't, especially if the footage is indeed DV 25... and why wouldn't it be? The DV codec has extremely low color resolution, it was recorded that way, the damage has already been done, and putting it in a higher-resolution comp does nothing to increase color resolution. In terms of color resolution, HDV is just as bad as DV. Check out this podcast and see why DV or HDV are just about the worst choices you can make for chroma keying:
