D90 for chromakey?

[Jack_Felis]

Hey guys, I've been reading all the great posts about the D90 and I'm fairly impressed with the video quality, regardless of the jello vision issue since I like to stay on a tripod. However, nobody has, as far as I know, posted anything about using the D90 for chromakey situations. If I wanted to buy this camera for filmmaking purposes, I'd at least like to know whether it can at least do this. The 720p resolution shouldn't be a problem, it's the MJPEG compression that has me worried. Any thoughts?

[Matthew Bennett]

I wouldn't recommend trying to pull a key with d90 footage.

Strangely enough, I dl'd the sample footage of the 5DII from DPreview, and the shot of a bird against a blue sky keyed almost perfectly with no fuss.

[ando]

the bird had such a large sharpening halo around that it was already masked for you :D

i don'y know about d90. it could do well. i see no reason why not.

[Rolly]

I just made a short clip with the D90 using chroma key in after effects, for those who want to see the result here the Vimeo link.

http://www.vimeo.com/1836490

[Car3o]

Well, I guess it goes to show it'll work. Who's the first to say something technical about it and that it sucks.

[Spybreaka]

That's pretty great Rolly - curious as to how you set that shot up if you wouldn't mind giving away your secrets? Verrrrry convincing.

[Nitemare]

Well, that's a nice exercise from Andrew Kraemers tutorials, works well.
But i wouldn't count on any camcorder with compression to perform good enough in any given chromakey task. I had the chance to work with RAWish footage in a bluebox and thought to myself, man these files are huge, why not aply some compression...hey motion JPEG seems nice, small and looks goo...oh wait. Now i have to soften the edges of the matte extensively and they still jitter like hell...
Well, looking at the compressed footage at 200% I saw the problem, compression artifacts, exactly like JPEG images, but very noisy. A colleague of mine had the same problem with the edges as he tried to chromakey from a HDV cam...
Fast and short action shots, ok! But everything more demanding cries for some way of capturing uncompressed footage.
I too am thinking of getting the D90, but I am very happy to have a professional greenbox at my uni...

[Rolly]

That's pretty great Rolly - curious as to how you set that shot up if you wouldn't mind giving away your secrets? Verrrrry convincing.

Thanks Spybreaka,

You can find the video tutorial at videocopilot : http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/advanced_car_hit/

Excellent tutorial from Andrew Kramer.