Keying Experimentation

Tonight I performed an experiment with chroma keying the circuit board footage as a test to see how much of an arduous process I am in for over the rest of my post production. This is a still from my footage:

As you can see, the chroma screens are underexposed, as are the subjects, and as a result the image is somewhat noisy, which doesn’t help matters with the already artifacted DV source. Also, there are lighting inconsistencies in the chroma screen. Also, like an idiot, I decided it would be a good idea to backlight the subjects with a blue-gel; I thought this would make my planned key more believable. I thought that because the blue light was from a source other than spill from the bluescreen, it would be okay. It’s not okay. Blue is blue! That must be kept in mind in the future.

Anyway, using the magic of the Keylight plugin for After Effects (read this awesome tutorial, anyone who might be interested in seeing how it can function), and some creative masking, I was able to pull a decent key.

Pixels should not be this large or this blocky!

This is slightly better… I achieved this by tweaking the settings of keylight and adding a subtle matte-choker.

This is the key without the mask on the circuit board. As you can see, the blue spilled onto the board from my backlight (arr!) is causing the keying plugin to make the board transparent, something that we don’t want to happen.

Since the board is stationary within the shot for a large period of time, I duplicated the layer and applied a mask to the board, effectively making the key only affect areas outside of the circuit board area. The results look alright, but I will be tweaking it more, possibly using the technique of blurring an adjustment layer and applying a transfer mode of “color”, in order to blur the chroma slightly without blurring the luminance, and thus counteract the DV artifacts somewhat, as outlined in the keylight tutorial.

Today I enthusiastically enjoyed the DVX100A proficiency with Ben, Alex, Dre, and the almighty Dave Cramton. Tomorrow, I will pick up my work order for it, and break open that pack of 5 new Panasonic Master Quality DV tapes, leaving the solitary Sony DVCAM tape that I bought solitary… and unused. (take that, DVCAM!). I will be doing tests on Friday to see if the 24p advanced mode can deliver the realistic progressive psuedo-filmlike motion and blur that I’m looking for, as well as doing a test pulldown, edit, reverse pulldown, and author to progressive-scan DVD. I will of course post the results here.

In other news, I have been drooling all over my monitor, reading about the Panasonic AG-HVX200, the HD successer to the DVX100, which records in 4:2:2 DVCPRO on P2 cards at a data rate of 100MB/s, and is capable of recording real variable framerates, much like the Varicam, except about $60,000 cheaper at $6,000. I’m excited by the fact that, in 6 or 7 years, this technology will be somewhat outdated, and I will probably be able to buy one for under 2 thousand dollars.