Where best tips to do Vegas ChromaKey ??

will-3 wrote on 3/22/2008, 2:43 PM
We are going to be shooting a very large number of 30 and 60 second bits with a green chromakey screen.

We did this first using Adobe Visual Communitor... (formerly Serious Magic Visual Communicator) The results were quite good with no trouble with lighting or imperfect background...

BUT... Visual Communicator, while it seems to be a good program... does not give you nearly the power and flexibility as Vegas (of course :)

So we shot some capturing strate to the hard disk via Vegas... and then used the Vegas chroma key effect. We can certainly do more with the clip but the chroma key doesn't seem as good around the edges of the subject.

We played with some of the effects adjustments... but couldn't get it like we wanted.

Can anyone point us to some good tips on how to get great chromakey with vegas??

Lights, etc identical for both products... but we really want to use Vegas if we can.

Thanks for any help.

Comments

apit34356 wrote on 3/22/2008, 3:12 PM
Check VASST site, DSE in the past has posted some tutorials about this. Serious magic is tough to beat on difficult green screens. Try building a mask by pushing some color and using key masking to cut out bad areas. This is usually a long task and if its interlace with motion, a real pain.
rs170a wrote on 3/22/2008, 3:15 PM
There are two chromakey articles on Keith Kolbos's site, one on budget lighting and the other on how to do good chroma key in Vegas.

Mike
Cheno wrote on 3/22/2008, 6:10 PM
Will,

I'm not sure if you're shooting DV or HDV? If you can, you'll get a better key in Vegas with HDV. If you're not so concerned about lighting but moreso a Vegas recipe for greenscreen, Keith's tute is pretty good. Couple of things I would suggest on top of that...

Turn camera sharpening to 0 or below, this will dramatically help the edge issues. Won't clear them up completely but will get rid of some of the harsh stepping.

Get your subject as far from the green screen as possible. Vegas doesn't handle spill well and while there are workarounds, this will give you a cleaner edge as well.

Shoot a black plate (subject not in front of green screen) before you begin and with each change in lighting (if it changes) - then select the entire frame sans talent. This will grab all of the green in your shot - I save as an effect preset and apply it to my talent footage then and tweak from there.

Another free option is the keyer from Cinegobs http://www.cinegobs.com - it's free and does a pretty good job and in many ways is superior to the Vegas keyer.

All in all, if you're going to be doing a lot of keying, I would suggest looking into a third-party keyer. Down the line, it will make things much easier.

If you want to email me offline - chenopup at gmail dot com, I'd be happy to look at a sample clip and give you some feedback.

Jim H wrote on 3/22/2008, 7:06 PM
I guess we all know lighting is everything. I pretty much switched over to Ultra2 for key work because it was so forgiving. But since I switch over to HD I tried Vegas again for a quick experiment and ended up using it for my final. Maybe it was the HD factor or maybe it's because I finally got enough lights to hit the screen with two dedicated lights, one for back light on the subject, a key and a fill. I guess it takes 5 lamps to do it right for me.... but you're on the right track, if you can do it all in Vegas why not.
Dach wrote on 3/23/2008, 7:30 AM
I just practiced with my first keying effect in Vegas this week and while I was aware of the principles of preparation I had never actually done it. I shot in HD and really spent little time setting up the shot and was impressed with the result.

Chad
farss wrote on 3/23/2008, 7:59 AM
Can you not export the clips out of Visual Communicator with an alpha channel and then composite etc in Vegas. This would give you the best of both worlds. That would mean exporting uncompressed AVIs and largish files but as they're only short clips it should be manageable.

Bob.
Cheno wrote on 3/23/2008, 9:42 AM
I export out of AE all of the time and unless I'm specifically building the comp in AE, use the alpha-channeled clip(s) in Vegas and build my comp there. LIke Bob said, same would be with any other third party program such as Visual Communicator, Cinegobs, etc...

This way you get the keying benefit of a good keyer and the color correction / compositing benefits of Vegas.