Keying in FCP

Jet Nine

Jet Nine

Well-known member
I'm trying to key some green screen in FCP.

Some of it works great and some of it doesn't key at all.

Anybody seen this before?

Any tips?

Is keying in FCP the best way to go?

Thnx
 
Thanks. Is this product comparable to keying in After Effects?

Is there a thread on AE keying?
 
You can also try keying with Primatte in Motion.

Your results will depend upon how well you shot your green screen. How was it exposed? How was the talent exposed? Camera settings? Format?
 
There are 7 different speakers that were shot on a DVX. Not sure of the camera settings.

The interesting thing is that some key great, and others not at all.

How does primatte stack up against FCP and AE?
 
Jet Nine said:
There are 7 different speakers that were shot on a DVX. Not sure of the camera settings.

The interesting thing is that some key great, and others not at all.

How does primatte stack up against FCP and AE?
Click to expand...

So it's DV format, which is one of the worst formats for keying. I had to help rescue a job shot on DV. It wasn't easy but Primatte was able to handle it.

I hope the camera was set on "manual" and not on "automatic". Because if the screen isn't consistent it'll become a keying nightmare.

Primatte is a plug-in. It comes with Motion and is also available for After Effects. I use it all the time and it's extremely powerful and versatile. You first define what is "green", then define what isn't green. It will then be able to separate some subtle differences. With the long series of other tools built into Primatte you can fine-tune things to get rid of green spill, retain detail, adjust transparency, etc.

It's capable of keying transparent plastic bottles, smoke, veils. I've even keyed a guy wearing a green shirt.

FCP is a great editor but lousy at anything else. It's not very good at scaling and terrible at keying.
 
I use DV Matte Pro and it works well. Even with modest lighting, it's just few tweaks to set up for a good key, with deeper settings for troublesome video.

I think Primatte worse nice when connecting to Motion. Matte Pro is in Motion too.
 
Awesome, thnx.

Now a dumb question.

Is it necessary to use a product like automatic duck to key in AE and import back into FCP?

Or can it be done straight up?
 
Automatic duck will let you take sequences of edits from FCP to AE if my memory serves me right. If you needed to use AE on every shot, and tweak the edit, then this would be useful.

For just keying a couple of clips- You don't need it. You can easily just take quicktime movies into AE, key them, export with an alpha channel, then import them into FCP.
 
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