Awhile ao i put up a simple greenscreen in my basement thinking that all i had to do if et a copy of my friends adobe premeire cd and i'd be off. WRONg, who knew chromakey would be so hard. I have tried sriouse ultra, adobe premeire, sony veas, and i still cant get a good key. Is thre any softare that you would suggest?
ChromaKey {greenscreen}
If you want some excellent chromakey, and really don't want to pay anything at all, then you should try Zwei-Stein Video Editor. The interface is a little diffrent, but once you get the hang of it it is possible to create good chromakeying in minutes, and even get rid of those annoying hotspots easily witout using troublesome thresholding.
http://www.zs4.net/
http://www.zs4.net/
Well, I use Ultimatte Advantage....it's the best I've seen and worked with and even works with DV's horrid 4:1:1 colorspace which is bad for chroma key work. Of course it runs around $1400 so if you are not a pro getting paid for your work I doubt you have the dough.
DVmatte Pro from DVgarage is good, (and cheap) Keylight comes with After Effects and is good as well. Primatee is pretty decent. But really the software isn't the biggest thing, the biggest thing is your PRODUCTION set up. If you don't light the screen EVENLY it won't matter about your software. You also want to get the subject as far away from te screen as possible, and backlight the subject to separate him from the screen and this will help kill the green "spill" as well. Then you want to have the subject in focus and the greenscreen out of focus as much as possible so as to minimize the wrinkles and such. To do that you need shallow depth of field.....kick in the ND filters and open up the iris as much as you can. Hopefully you do have a camcorder with manual adjustments...you need it. If you do all this you should be able to pull a decent key with the built in keyer in your NLE....I can in Final Cut Pro or After Effects, not as good as what I get from Ultimatte's plug in but pretty decent. If you need any other tips PM me, I own a video production company and have a BA in TV production.
DVmatte Pro from DVgarage is good, (and cheap) Keylight comes with After Effects and is good as well. Primatee is pretty decent. But really the software isn't the biggest thing, the biggest thing is your PRODUCTION set up. If you don't light the screen EVENLY it won't matter about your software. You also want to get the subject as far away from te screen as possible, and backlight the subject to separate him from the screen and this will help kill the green "spill" as well. Then you want to have the subject in focus and the greenscreen out of focus as much as possible so as to minimize the wrinkles and such. To do that you need shallow depth of field.....kick in the ND filters and open up the iris as much as you can. Hopefully you do have a camcorder with manual adjustments...you need it. If you do all this you should be able to pull a decent key with the built in keyer in your NLE....I can in Final Cut Pro or After Effects, not as good as what I get from Ultimatte's plug in but pretty decent. If you need any other tips PM me, I own a video production company and have a BA in TV production.
Also to minimize the spillage of color I have found a simple, extreamely lame and mostly overlooked formula. Scrap the paper and use the foam screens. Yes, a little more expensive but then never ever have hotspots unless you are using some kind of spotlight from a police car or something. Lighthing I could never get right on the budget we were using, but the freeware Zwei-Stein Video Editor, as i said, helps eliminate those with it's eye-dropper chromakey format. For quick, internet quality chromakey that you can throw up on YouTube quite successfully, use it. I am not sure how it would handle a DVD resolution file. Work on the lighting, and really try the foam screen. Aside from needing a lint roller once in a while it is excellent.
I just tried the Zwei-Stein Video Editor for myself and found it to be way to slow to use on my system. But as it has been said, I think what is captured by the cameras is way more important in chroma keying than what software is used.
I just checked out the Zwei-Stein Video Editor link, and low and behold they have a new version. The old version, which i could not even find in their archives anymore, ran slow but it did work rather well. Albeit the new version is slow, it is freeware. I had no problems running the older version on a P3-333mhz Gateway laptop. I will contact the t@b group sometime and see if I can host a download of their older system. I agree, the cameras and lighting, mainly the lighting, makes more of a diffrence. I think I will experiment with the Adobe Premiere Elements software, it should work pretty well and I already have it from Christmas, it is excellent for video editing.
Sometimes it is not a problem of the software but the way you light the chroma shot.
Keep the background lighting flat and even. Sometimes, you will get a problem of stray light spilling on the subject and this can really kill your shot.
Minimise all these during the shoot and you should have no problem in editing.
_________________________________________________
www.digitalvideolessons.com
Resource Centre for Digital Video Productions
Keep the background lighting flat and even. Sometimes, you will get a problem of stray light spilling on the subject and this can really kill your shot.
Minimise all these during the shoot and you should have no problem in editing.
_________________________________________________
www.digitalvideolessons.com
Resource Centre for Digital Video Productions
try to use adobe after effects it has a lot more tools in keying.... try to look for tutorials at youtube i forgot the address search for there are a lot of good tuts.. there... you find useful tips in keying.....
 |