Of course, any legal hue or chroma can be expressed as RGB, HSL, hex, decimal, etc.

It's all colors of light.

Yes, but it's not just (re-)calculating chroma to RGB values. If that's it, you could simply switch the control of the Vegas Pro keyer to "HSL". But keyers are designed differently based on their internal color math model. You've got chroma keyer, RGB keyer, YUV keyer, color difference keyer, etc. and they all work differently with all having their own pros and cons.

That said, unfortunately Vegas Pro's so called "Chroma Keyer" is very basic and has some issues since its first days. If you need decent keying, you're better done using an external plug-in just like the BCC one mentioned above, the zMatte Keyer of DFT or HitFilm's/Ignite's Chroma Keyer.

If you had purchased Vegas 16 when Magix had the introductory offer that included some Boris plug-ins, you would have the BCC Chroma Key Studio plug-in. That has a very comprehensive set of controls including Hue, Saturation, and Lightness tolerances. I hadn't known about this until I read your post and went looking. Here is a link to the help for the plug-in: http://web.borisfx.com/helpdocs/?page_id=5282

 

Thank you.

Right now, Magix are offering Vegas Pro Edit as an upgrade for $199 that includes Boris FX Continuum & Blend Key Unit which looks like it contains the similar capability:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1134380-REG/boris_fx_bckey_boris_continuum_key.html

I wish Vegas has an option to work in HSL (YCrCb) space. Some tasks would be a whole lot easier - and better.

Of course, any legal hue or chroma can be expressed as RGB, HSL, hex, decimal, etc.

It's all colors of light.

True but converting between color spaces isn't the same as working in different ones. A given object will have the same Hue irrespective of the level of illumination which is carried in the Luma channel whereas all the RGB channels will vary to represent the same information. It really should be called Colorkey :)

Thanks for replying.

John,

First, I agree with your request. Accessing certain color values in a way that is familiar is important to me, too.

However, what I said is correct. Hue, RGB, CMYK, Decimal, Hex, Percent, are all scaled indices that live within a color space, which we really needn't concern ourselves with. That means Hue can be adjusted on my old school Y'CbCr teevee as well as a print on my RGB monitor, if I should wish.

Hue is a scaled index independent of color space. Welcome to the forums.

@John-Miller, I just forgot – some years ago when I did not yet use zMatte/Ignite I sometimes prefered to use the Vegas Pro "Color Corrector Secondary" as keyer. It not only overcomes the annoying bug of the Vegas Pro "Chroma Keyer" but it also allows for some more tunings like adjusting the matte by luma, saturation and hue, each with it's own smoothness control. At least this one is a little bit closer to what we might call "Chroma" key.

I've just tried the Boris package I mentioned above - night and day (if a tad slow), so I've gone ahead and purchased my Vegas upgrade (from Version 10) with the bundled Boris package for a total of $199.

I do have a bit of a love affair with YCrCb processing. Years ago, I wrote an application for performing real-time video processing of incoming DV streams and outputting them to another DV device. It almost exclusively operated in the native YCrCb space of the format. In part, that's what gave it the speed because it didn't require full decompression and recompression of a frame. But DV and Firewire went the way of the Dodo, sadly.

John, the old Mictrosoft dv codec was the only one that operated in REC601, and it is noncompliant with the DV spec. Several of us were around then.

We considered it a red herring then, but it saved Windows Movie Maker users a conversion step to DVD. Totally for soccer moms.

I wrote my own from the ground up and even purchased the official spec from the IEC to be sure to be correct! Hand-crafted assembly code and other masochistic goings on. The origins for the whole thing came about for the most unlikely reason. I went to Africa on safari with my PDX-10 which could shot in true 16:9. When I got back, I was astonished that I couldn't get a widescreen TV in the US (they were readily available in Europe). So, on a whim, I decided to embark on what became an epic journey to use a laptop (in 2005!) to letterbox in real-time the PDX-10 signal and send it out through a DV-NTSC converter. Most (all) compression formats use some form of cosine transforms but nearly (all) editing software fully decompresses and transforms the data to give the full RGB frame, make the change and reverse the processes. If you want to just change one pixel, that's a lot of CPU time. So much can be done without the transform which is by far the most intensive part of the change. Some things such as changing brightness/contrast could be done literally 1000 times faster. I toyed with the idea of extending the idea to HDV but dealing with key frames etc was too scary, plus the $20,000 fee to get the MPEG-2 specification.

Thanks for sharing that. Did the uprade give you more control over input methods?

Do you mean capture sources? If so, no. Just the same old DV/'HDV or SDI' options. I'm amazed that NLEs haven't improved in this regard. Neither Vegas or the latest Premiere Pro recognize my webcams, DSLRs etc. It's not the end of the world (just annoying workarounds) but if Camtasia and SparkoCam can do it...

I had a few years away from editing and am pleased that Vegas feels just the same as before - it's like riding a bike. I tried the latest Premiere Pro and instantly remembered why I dropped it after version 7. Still some of the same bugs as in version 1.1.

Can Vegas chromakey using chroma (hue) instead of RGB?

I thought I understood your question better. Did the upgrade with Boris BCC provide you with more familiar controls over your color input, or not?

Do you mean capture sources?

Still uncertain what part source properties might play in your thinking here, but it is not contained in your original question nor in its solution. Thus, the Off-Topic area might be a better place for our warhorse tales, eh?

I see. Yes, it did for sure. It actually did a very good job without me having to play around too much. Thanks.