Vegas Chroma Key vs CineGobs Keyer...

TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/21/2007, 8:55 AM
I decided to record some footage from a crappy greenscreen at work. It's bad. it's lit with the same florescent lights the room is. :( Non-evenly. :'( you must stand within 1 foot of it. :'''''(

anyway.. here's what I did:



As you can see the Vegas one, w/o any touching up to the DV footage, keyed the green but all the "depth" that was made by shadows is still there. Great for a perfect key (i've even had small issues then) but as you can see, not as good as it could be. Green also creeps in to what I don't want keyed. Looks like a projector displayed on the wall.

With the ConeGob's keyer it's much cleaner. But, by default, has lots of hard edges. But it keyed out a lot that the vegas one wouldn't & it made things full transparent. But... it's not a plugin & it assumes full control of the video file so if you're using CineGob with a file that's in Vegas, you can's use that file in vegas again until you close cinegob. And you can only export a PNG sequence. That isn't exactly bad but I'd prefer a 32-bit uncompressed AVI option.

So there's some visual difference. I'm not a good, or great, keyer but I figured many people here would want to see the results as many people here aren't in the full blown production business (like me) and can't afford things perfect & need things fast.

Comments

jrazz wrote on 9/21/2007, 9:00 AM
Thanks for the comparison.

j razz
CineGobs wrote on 9/21/2007, 9:37 AM
Thanks for your test and your comments.

AVI export will be added in a future version and I'll also add a chroma blur function which should help especially with NTSC DV.

Bo

Cheno wrote on 9/21/2007, 9:47 AM
DV is a bear to key right - best luck I ever had keying was using Ultimatte back in the day -

the CineGobs keyer seems to work reallly well with HDV and HD footage - I didn't have any DV to test it with but for 4:2:0 and 4:2:2, obviously there are a few things missing that could make it better but for free and virtually a 2 or 3 click keyer, I'm very impressed.

Bo, one thing that would be useful would be a white setting for the luma keyer - I do a lot of white cyc stuff and would love to test your keyer on that.

-cheno
TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/21/2007, 10:00 AM
DV is a bear to key right - best luck I ever had keying was using Ultimatte back in the day -

I agree. That's why I did the test, many of us use DV. Might as well know how it will work with our most common format, just not what's used for demo purposes. :)

FYI, I love the Vegas keyer. It's amazing. Unlike CineGob, it can key ANYTHING. CineGob is limited to greens, reds, blues & alphas. Also something I never mentioned: you can export from cinegob JUST the key (png's with just alpha). So you can use parent/child tracks. Basically the same thing if you applied a mask to footage & used that as an alpha via parent/child.
CineGobs wrote on 9/21/2007, 10:14 AM
> Bo, one thing that would be useful would be a white setting for the luma keyer - I do a lot of white cyc stuff and would love to test your keyer on that.

That should actually be pretty easy to implement. I'll add it to my todo list.

Bo
goodtimej wrote on 9/21/2007, 10:49 AM
Keylight is the best.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/21/2007, 11:09 AM
for not $1k it isn't to me.
Cheno wrote on 9/21/2007, 11:38 AM
You can get it bundled with AFX Pro - for as little as a couple hundred if you're a student :)
TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/21/2007, 4:48 PM
i'm not a student so I pay extra to get students a discount. I'm also not one of those people who get a student to buy it for them & pay them the student price. I may be cheap & not an adobe fan but I'm not going to cheat a company out of their $$.
farss wrote on 9/21/2007, 5:29 PM
There's obviously people here who have invested the money in high end tools and the time to learn how to use them. We are a community, perhaps we could all pull together a little more and offer our services to one another?

It's no longer that difficult to move huge amounts of data around the planet so what's stopping us. I think anyone offering services has to be able to cover their costs so I'm not suggesting freebies here, maybe just mates rates.

Bob.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/21/2007, 6:11 PM
that's not a bad idea. Heck, maybe a forum for people to share small job's with others in the vegas community. Similar to craig's list but just for forum users. Perhaps even an e-bay style rating system? I know, for example, I'm NEVER going to spend $1k on a piece of software. I'd have no use for it.
farss wrote on 9/21/2007, 6:43 PM
It's not just the cost of the tools, it's the time to acquire the skills to use them. I've got AE Pro and Keylight but until I put in the serious hours to learn how to use it for obvious reasons I'm not putting my hand up.
There's probably people here who've got even better tools like Fusion and Primatte and know how to use them.


But getting back to the idea of a Craigs list thing, amen.
I've had jobs where footage needed to be shot all over the planet and the client was good for commercial rates, tried getting someone here to do it but no joy, don't know why.

Sony do have a website / forum for this kind of thing but I think most of us would be out of our depth so our own patch of turf is a good idea. I don't think this particular forum is the ideal place but we do have The Wikkies thanks to Jonathan. Maybe that could be a good starting point, maybe this subject deserves its own thread?

Bob.
Cheno wrote on 9/21/2007, 6:52 PM
Bob & gang,

great thinking - I know I've had to turn down jobs because there were times when I couldn't either do the stuff myself or couldn't find the available guys to farm the work out to.

How many of us would benefit from a Sony Vegas + network? I'll raise my hand. I know I've worked remotely with a few in the forum already this way and I think being able to post skill sets could be very helpful to someone looking for that extra bit of help with their projects. It may be a way for everyone to stretch their productions wings a bit.

Perhaps another forum here on the Sony site would be awesome - a marketplace so to speak.

-cheno
TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/21/2007, 7:13 PM
i'm for it. i don't normally need help as I don't do much but I love doing specific jobs. I find it fun.
jrazz wrote on 9/21/2007, 10:22 PM
Bob,

Great idea. Has anyone brought this up to Jonathan? I don't see why he wouldn't add an additional forum line for this purpose.

j razz
Grazie wrote on 9/21/2007, 10:40 PM
I'm in - totally!

Grazie
ushere wrote on 9/22/2007, 12:37 AM
how about footage exchange?

i'd love some stock us (ny, los angles, iconic views / setting), uk (picadilly sq, blackpool, etc.,), and in return i could supply, desert, more desert, sydney, and endless horse stuff....

leslie
CineGobs wrote on 9/24/2007, 8:56 AM
Just released a new version of my keyer.
http://www.cinegobs.com/index.php?topic=90

@Cheno: Added White to the luma keyer.

Bo
Soniclight wrote on 9/24/2007, 2:57 PM
CineGobs,

Thanks for the info and additions -- as well as your informative "Planned Changes" page. Looks like you really listen to user input, that's very cool.
CineGobs wrote on 10/6/2007, 4:52 AM
Released a new version of my keyer, with AVI export.

http://www.cinegobs.com/index.php?topic=92

Bo
Kennymusicman wrote on 10/6/2007, 9:37 AM
YES - A "people/services" market would be cool. I would happily sign up and offer my expertise where I could, a simple (and cheap, as mentioned "mates-rates") commercial venture would be brilliant to set up.

We could cover so many regions and countries in no time, not to mention formats - video, audio, visual (as in flash, photoshop, composition etc).

Brilliant.

Ken

Tom Pauncz wrote on 10/6/2007, 10:02 AM
In Like Flynn - I'm interested and am located in Toronto
Cheers,
Tom