Thanks, Paddy. I'm wondering when you say,

"One strategy would be to apply a second instance of the chroma keyer plug-in, to mask just the bright spot"

How is that accomplished, just masking the bright spot with the second instance of the chroma-keyer? Is there a way to just zoom in on the bright color?

Another option is to light the green screen evenly.
Much less time consuming that fixing it in post.

I would apply the Color Corrector (Secondary) before your Chroma Key plug-in and use the secondary color corrector to tone down the bright spot to match the rest of the screen.

~jr

Johnny, thanks. I went to the "Custom" tab of the "Color Corrector (Secondary)", selected the "Darken Mids" preset, unchecked "Limit Luminance" and it looks pretty good. Not perfect but not far from it. Another tool discovered thanks to the forum.

If the subject that you need to key isn't in front of the bright spot then use a Bezier Mask to get rid of it. The trick to getting a good key is to only worry about the pixels adjacent to the subject, the rest is better dealt with using a garbage matte,

Bob.

Thanks, Bob for the tips. I will try those out. Things that I'm not familiar with.

Bob, just learned the basics of the Bezier Curve and it is great. Will be a tool I will use a whole lot. Thanks. Now if I only knew all the other things I don't know.

What about the VirtualDub slide bulb burnthrough thing?
JJK

Well, a funny thing. I applied the Bezier mask to a clip, used Track Motion, and it affects the clip next to it. I moved the clip to another track and that solved the problem. What is happening? Does a clip using the Bezier Curve have to be on a track by itself?

JJK, does the "VirtualDub slide bulb" have anything to do with my question? Thanks.

Yes, it fixes the bleached out center of the picture caused by the heat of the bulb.
JJK

So, a whole track has been ruined because of that? Search doesn't turn up anything that I've seen. Where is the fix? Thanks.

Only for one slide, one event. The green screen is something else. Sorry for misleading you on that.
JJK

"Does a clip using the Bezier Curve have to be on a track by itself?"

No. You can have two clips on the one track and apply an FX, pan/crop or bezier mask to one and it will not affect the other. If you're seeing some effect on one clip affecting another on the same track something else is happening, possibly something that you haven't explained about your project or some very unusual bug.

Bob.

I applied the Bezier Curve to 2 or 3 clips, can't remember how many. After saving and reopening, a whole track has been affected and it was around 20 clips. I moved them to another track and that solved the problem, I can't think of anything else that I did to cause this. I played around with the curve because I saw the problem before I posted. I noticed that the problem didn't affect the other clips until Track Motion was used. Also I have a blank space on each clip to the left 1/4 of the clips.

Restarted my machine. New project with 9 clips, jpegs, mp4 and mts files. Applied Bezier Curve, no problems. Selected Track Motion, moved the one clip and it affected the whole track. But it is "Track Motion." So that is the problem. I had watched a youtube video and this guy was using that. But, if not Track Motion, how do you move the one clip from the original location without affecting the whole track? Is there a Clip Motion? Will look. :-) Thanks.

Well, it's easier to keep the Bezier Curve on its own track and no other clips on the same track if you're going to use Track Motion with the Curve. But, you can use the position tracker (don't know the correct term for this) at the bottom of the Track Motion window just as you do with Event Pan/Crop on individual clips. But it is hard or it was for me. Or time consuming.

I'm thoroughly confused.

Track motion affects the position / motion of clips on the track. If you move a clip then it's track motion keyframes move with it and I agree that is confusing,

The mask is applied as part of event pan/crop and obviously stays with the clip. I've tried pretty hard to mess things up but I cannot get a mask applied to one clip to affect another clip even when using track motion.

Bob.

Bob, thanks for the reply. I'm confused as well. On the video I'm working on I need to put each clip on a separate track for the Bezier Curve (bc) and Track Motion (tm) not to affect the other tracks. Then I thought to put the clip on a separate track, apply the bc and tm and put it back on the original track. But it reverts back to the original bc without the changed tm (inheriting the original track's motion I guess). So a separate track for all clips with bc and tm is what I'm using on that project.

Then I put 9 clips, various ones, on the timeline with a new project. After applying the bc and tm it affects all clips on that track. Then I moved the clip to a new track, applied the bc and tm, moved the clip back to the original track and bc and tm was intact (and it didn't affect the other clips at all). So yes, I'm confused as well. Will experiment some more later today. All in all I still like the bc and tm. But it seems a little crazy to say the least. Maybe someone else will post their findings on the bc and tm.