I used a similar technique with Vegas Pro 9 with pretty good results.

Posted by Paul V on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 @ 08:37 PM

Some screen captures would be very helpful. Paul V is right...Vegas has been doing this very well for a while.

Posted by Marc B on Monday, September 21, 2009 @ 01:24 PM

Avid DS also is a treat for working with greenscreen footage. However, I don't understand how poor keying would make his jacket appear looser...

Posted by Kevin on Monday, September 21, 2009 @ 01:30 PM

AE is the way to go with complex green screen. But I have also found that FCP does a pretty good job at it. If you have two different colors of green in the clip you can use the eyedropper to select one part of the clip and then hold the shift key to select the other different shade of green. This gives really good results. Try tweaking in the advanced controls (not the visual option) in FCP to get best results.

Posted by Mark on Monday, September 21, 2009 @ 01:33 PM

We have been involved in matting since 1970 with "R matte" at Technicolor Vidtronics and than with "Ultimatte" at Videography Studios.

Two old sayings come to mind as we read the modern gyrations used to save poorly shot foreground mattes for compositing in post.

1. "Garbage In - Garbage Out"
2. "The Devil is in the details"

In those early days the composite was completed at the time of principal photography and much time was consumed on the sets because we did not have freeze frames of background plates to preview against. We had to keep rewinding tape and than making lighting adjustments.

With modern digital tools it would seem reasonable that producer/cameramen would take the bit of extra time to clean up undesirable shadows or highlights during principal photography.

Nonetheless we see shoddy matting all the time and I guess these days "we'll save it in post" has become the headline.

For those who are interested in seeing what "old fashioned matting" looked like back in the days of analog, check out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs9ezBiFohM

Cheers

Posted by Videography on Monday, September 21, 2009 @ 02:25 PM

In Vegas 8 I have had success by boosting the green hue in the greenscreen footage, helps turn some of those gray areas a bit more green and easier to key.

Posted by Bill M on Monday, September 21, 2009 @ 02:29 PM

Awesome. I may have figured this out on my own (yeah sure), but you probably saved me years. Thanks a ton.

Posted by Dave on Monday, September 21, 2009 @ 02:35 PM

Thanks! You just saved me a ton of time, energy, and money!

Posted by Damon on Monday, September 21, 2009 @ 09:26 PM

Too bad this info didn't come sooner. I did the same thing a few months ago, but that shot required 3 keys. It took me an hour to figure out if adding more than one key would work.

Posted by Eric on Monday, September 21, 2009 @ 11:09 PM

veri nice tutorial

Posted by tome on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 @ 12:59 PM

There is really no reason to receive a bad green screen image, if people would just do a little homework, I realize that it happens but that is of no excuse.

Posted by John Holosko c.s.c. on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 @ 02:33 PM

I'll try and get some screen shots. I did this at my clients place not mine, so I need to get the footage from him.

Posted by Marc Franklin on Thursday, October 8, 2009 @ 06:19 PM

We use Green Screen successfully in Premiere Pro (stock plugins) to put our News Anchor on a Space Station on Astrocast.TV. But do have to tweek depending on Anchor wardrobe.

Posted by Rich on Sunday, October 11, 2009 @ 09:39 AM

I submitted some illustrations to clear up any confusion. Hopefully they will be up soon.

Posted by Marc Franklin on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 @ 04:49 AM

Just want to point out that After Effects has shipped with Keylight at least since version 7, something that the wording of the intro seems to imply it doesn't.

Posted by Jonas Hummelstrand on Sunday, November 22, 2009 @ 09:33 AM

The "Keylight" comment was added by one of my bosses. Honestly, I never used it either. In the tutorial, wanted to show how to do the procedure without going to After Effects, as many don't know how to use it.

Posted by Marc Franklin on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 @ 10:41 PM

Anyone who can come up with only one downside to Ultra CS3 has never REALLY done a LOT of keying. Ultra can only key one piece of footage at a time. Ergo, the studios were useless for more than one person, unless they were all shot on the same footage, which introduces a whole lot of other issues. The standalone part would have been bearable without that one minus. There are other issues that I hated, but it's been awhile.

Posted by Sylvia on Tuesday, May 25, 2010 @ 04:07 AM