Quote Originally Posted by samsc
travel mattes are cool.

as are things like chromakey - but keying anything - with compressed footage - just opens up a huge can of worms that end-users wont expect or understand.

i dont think many people understand the minimum requirements for getting a real and usable key off digital video....

i wish i could wave a magic wand that would not get people into trouble.
but keying is such a lot of trouble....if you dont start with very good quality footage - dv isnt anywhere near good enough...

to make keying work - like the professionals - you have to work with uncompressed footage. and you have to shoot on something that has proper colour sampling.

as an effect its possible to make something that is ok, but if endusers want it to look like the pro-s - they are going to be dissapointed.
Richard,

I hate to be the devils advocqate here, especially to you but:
http://www.globalstreams.com/ You're right, keying with DV sucks. I've done it both in DV and using a camera that shoots uncompressed video. I would take the tape and bring it into FCP, then AE or Shake and use Keylight to key out the greenscreen and bluescreens that I setup. I then layer this footage over other content so I could get the artists layered into the content and play it onscreen via one layer in Catalyst.

I would do things like use this cycore filter in AE called dots (I think) where I could take my artist keys and disintegrate them into this matrix of dots that would fly off the screen, all sorts of cool stuff.

Here are some tips to chromakey succesfully.
1. Light your blue or green screen 1 stop brighter than your foreground image.
2. If you can at all avoid it, don't use a dv cam, you need something that will record 4:2:2 uncompresed video. There are some fairly cheap to rent xd cameras out there.
3. If using keylight or primatte make sure you look at your key through all the different status veiws and understand what they are for. Most of the time when I'm keying out a b/g scrn subject, I'm looking only at black, grey, and white pixels, each color representing the amount of transparancy.
4. A slight feather can soften the key edge just enough
5. dilate erode is a great macro in shake that will eat away or expand your matte in subpixel resolutions. This can be very useful.

As richard pointed out, if you are just doing some wacky effect type stuff, a good DV camera will work fine. Just know and master Keylight and Primatte.

The globecaster Live and 6000 will key live. You could take the output and feed it into catalysts input. reflecmedia.com is a very cool concept for live key situations. I forsee this technology coming more into play in the future. They are even working on a keyable cloth that has matchmove markings embeded invisibly within the grey key material.

BTW: This should be in a different topic. Key and Fill titling technique has nothing to do with chromakey. Sorry if I confused anyone. I could see how it could sound like that's what I'm talking about.

Also, Catalyst with live Keying would be over the top awesome. Let's do it Richard!

Kindly,
Christian