The Suite is Vegas & DVDA, plus Sony Production Music, Hitfilm 2 Ultimate & Production Assistant. Vegas and DVDA are the same between the Suite & non Suite packages.

If ChromaKey work is your main special workflow, I would be very careful about what you put together. Some might suggest the Hitfilm Ultimate solution, but it really gets a more complicated than that.
There are many good solutions to Chromakey at reasonable cost and at levels of tolerance you might be willing to accept. I suggest that merely upgrading to VPro12 is not necessarily a good thing for this.

Here is an interesting thread about chromakeying:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=856725

Hmmm, we want great chromakey quality and intend to do our editing in Vegas.

Are you suggesting we switch to something else?

(We do not chromakey in real time but in post-production)

Or are you suggesting we chromakey the main background in another product and do other editing after that in Vegas? Or what?

Thanks for the help.

DO YOUR Research of Chroma Key. Lighting is everything. Color format be it raw 4.4.4 or ? is really important! Acceptable quality is up to you.

Plug-ins such as Boris are better than a lot of cheaper ones. I use NewBlueFX Pro Key inside of Vegas9.0e for output to Blu-ray but not broadcast.

The croma key in Boris Red seems to be superior - but I have not been able to compare that with Hitfilms really.

I'd do chroma keying in HitFilm Ultimate and editing in Vegas Pro.

The chroma keyer of HitFilm Ultimate is one of the best software chroma keyer I've ever used. The Boris keyers are great - but when it's about quality and flexibility HitFilm Ultimate's chroma keyer is 'better', imho, though you would need to take some time to learn to use it (actually there is no such a thing like "the best chroma keyer" because different great chroma keyers are made for different kind of goals and all are optimized in certain different ways). The advantage of the Boris keyers is you can use them as regular plug-ins in Vegas Pro and them are more easy to handle.

If you take some closer looks onto the HitFilm Ultimate chroma keyer you may find this one is close to Keylight (though Keylight is a color difference keyer, HitFilm's one is a chroma keyer).

as the old adage goes - cr*p in, cr*p out.

if you want superlative chromakey then it's of vital importance you start off with the best quality input, not only lighting the set, etc., but capturing with a robust codec, pref 4:4:4.

i have seen outstanding examples of chromakeying done with vegas's own set of tools, and equally horrendous examples using the best of available plugins....

but you knew that already ;-)

I have been using the chroma key in hit films, and I have been getting some very clean and nice work out of it. The only problem i have been having is if I open Hit Film out of Vegas do my chroma key work and then switch back to Vegas all my audio is out of sync.If I just use Hit Film as a stand alone render the work then bring it into Vegas then i have no problem. Hit Film is all I use now for chroma key work

videoITguy and ushere hit it on the nose. Lighting, color space and recording codec are the most important components of a good chromakey. When most of us talk about the "best" chromakeyer, we're looking for software that will make up for our sloppiness in production or using a poor format (AVCHD, HDV, anything less than 4:2:2 ) for keying.

I haven't used Red in years, but BCC's keying and matte tools combined with Lightwrap can do wonders for marginally shot keys. But I haven't found anything that beats After Effects and Keylight. At one time VideoCopilot had a tutorial for using two instances of Keylight in a plugin chain that could make even the worst shot somewhat usable.

Vegas has a very limited keyer and it requires a lot of manipulation (masking and filtering) with several layers to get it to do a decent job. It can be done but it is very tedious and time consuming.

I was not all that impressed with the keyer that came with Hitfilm but admittedly I have not checked over in detail just a cursory look. I would place it on par with the keyer you can get from NewBlue.

I am very satisfied with the plugin that BorisFX sells in their BCC keying unit. It goes on sale for $150 US (twice this year that I know of). It has a lot of control and gives very good keyes (even respectable with 4:2:0 8-bit footage).

Red Giant makes the Primatte keyer which is expensive but reportedly very good. EDIT: It appears that the Red Giant Keyer is not compatible with Sony Vegas Pro.

BTW I find that keying in a regular edit is cumbersome and I usually use the greenscreen stuff as a separate nested project. With that in mind you could easily skip all that and use Blender for your composites and green screening. It is free software and the compositor (where you'd do the green screening) is far superior to any of the above. In particular the more recent versions have had very nice masking features added and improved motion tracking. It also does this in 32 bit color space where as Hitfilm is only 16 bit. The only downside is that it will take some getting use to. It is node based (rather than layers) and the interface is complicated. The results are amazing.

My $0.02

+1 BCC8 chromakeyer. I think it is on sale this week.

The Boris BCC ChromaKey unit currently selling is only available for VegasPro12 iterations. Earlier versions need not apply.

So the thing is, does anyone have a version of VPro12 (state the version number, please) that they feel is perfectly stable and working well with this keyer plug-in? Stable means compared to the rock stable behavior of Vegas9.0e 32bit platform no matter what you throw at it.

I haven't had problems with the BCC plug in, regardless of version. Newblue Titler on the other hand.....

Some of these other plugs are in the same boat as being only usable in 12 (or at least 64 bit versions).

But as a plugin the BCC keyer doesn't seem squirly.

(BTW I don't think any version of VP 12 fits your criteria regardless of the plug used. But you are welcome to continue to use 9).

Thank you dancerchris , for your honest eval. I think your accounting for the BCC plug-in being well behaved is great, but so dissappointing to hear that VPro12 in any iteration is not up to a software standard that can be used for business.

I appreciate your remark about NewBlue Titler as quirk ridden - and indeed I found some unique ways to get around that...as far as NewBlue ChromaKey Pro and the rest of NewBlue installed on Version 9.0e - performs very well for a business purpose.

@videoITguy: I never claimed it wasn't. That is your interpretation. You set a standard as essentially crash proof. Many people are running VP 12 with no regular issues, certainly nothing that would be an impediment to conducting business.

IMO it is unreasonable to expect a piece of software to be crashproof over every concievable system hardware/software configuration. It just doesn't happen in my experience. Could Vegas be implimented better? Sure. But if your criteria is crash proof I don't think that FCP, Avid, or Premier will get you there either.

If you really want the PRO software you might be better served with an industry standard like Avid especially with its significant price drop that occured this year. I will be sticking with Vegas becuase that is what my plugs work with....and I like it.

My $0.02

I do run VP12 770 without any issue. But I also never had any issue with VP11 all the way down to VP7; it's just a matter of having the right hardware. BBC8 has great FX plug-ins but those are all very resource intensive and on my machine I can't have Best/Full or even Good/Full preview with any BCC8 plug-in. For that reason, I try to work without them and use only what Vegas has to offer.

re my "rock-stable" comment proposed earlier. There is perhaps some slight mis-interpretation of what that should mean. I note an argument is made that all software has some fail rate do to the nature of bugs.

But, I am an IT guy who has built many large servers for organizations that need them to be complex but yet failsafe. The industry taken as a whole has interpretations for what is rock-stable work. As most forum comments have testified in the past - that kind of stability established for an NLE platform based on VegasPro install has not been around since the last release of VPro 9.0.

The demand in hardware has changed significantly with VP11 and 12 and that is where many have an issue, IMHO. Many users are using the same hardware as the used to for VP9 and that doesn't work well. Also, you can't throw as many things at VP9 as at VP12 so you can't throw "anything" at VP9. But, if VP9 is sufficient for your work, then stay with it. VP12 is "rock-solid" here by any "industry" definiation.

I attempted to use BorisFX chroma key but it crashed Vegas Pro 12 on my desktop. Vegas would no longer open. I contacted the vendor and was told that it was incompatible with my AMD hardware. I had do do a complete uninstall and clean re-install of Vegas.

Has anyone had good results with NewBlue FX chroma key?