Green Screen work. Dynamic link between PPro & AE CS4 or export between?

shawn.w

Active member
Hey Everyone,

I just finished a week of shooting interviews in front of a green screen using my HMC150. Now the question becomes, what is the best way to integrate these green screen shots into my already large project?

I should say this is my first HD project so I'm probably unfamiliar with some of the tricks that would make this much easier on me, so please point them out!

I have probably 10 hours of green screen interview footage, and will end up with 10 hours of B-roll footage, covering classrooms, labs, etc, as this is a promo for a local college. So around 20 hours total footage. The college has many departments that each need a video, so this is why there is so much footage.

We will be doing a bit of color correction, and perhaps some added effects on the project, so I decided I will probably buy Cineform Neo as my master codec. That and after some tests it seems Cineform keys much better than AVCHD in AE CS4.


This is however my first time using PPro and AE CS4. Can someone suggest some good work flow options? I'm under the assumption that it will go something like this:

1. Import footage onto PC
(Vista 64bit, I7 720 processor, 12gigs ram, ATI radeon HD 4850, 2 TB storage)
2. Batch convert all AVCHD footage to Cineform
3. Import all Cineform footage into PPro CS4
4. Edit down to a final cut
5. Dynamic link PPro sequence to AE CS4, key out green screen w/ primatte, add in any additional effects or text.
6. Final export to DVD and web from PPro or AE?

The College wants the finished products for DVD and for their web pages.

I suppose I could try to keep everything in PPro CS4 if they make a good keying tool for it, but I've heard using primatte in AE is best.

I'm sure I'm overlooking a lot here or I'm mistaken about how I should go about transferring footage from PPro to AE, so let me know what recommendations you would make. And if you need any more info on my project or setup to make a recommendation please let me know. Thanks!

- Shawn
 
It will depend on the quality of your shots and lighting / shooting conditions, to determine whether or not you need to resort to AE. If your shots were perfect, identical lighting etc.... theoretically you could do it all in PP.

Doing what you propose above with dynamic link on the entire project might pose problems if your shooting / lighting conditions differed between clips. If you have to do multiple passes on keying or rotoscoping, it will quickly become a nightmare with dynamic link. Even if the keys were identical, you might run into memory problems with dynamic link on a big project

I've also noticed dynamic link can be unstable on big projects. You can search this subforum (and other message boards), and you can read up on similar experiences

So if you have footage that requires different treatment for keys (and since you have lots of footage) , I would do a rough cut, key individual cuts, then reimport into PP. It will consume less memory and snappier to edit in PP than dynamic link, but will take up more HDD space
 
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