FS7: Help! Green Screen After Reffects in Custom Mode

C

Cynthia Webster

Active member
Howdy!

I just spent three-days shooting green screen in custom mode & HD XAVC-I and the Director/Editor is attempting
to pull a key using the latest After Effects and not happy with the key he's getting so far. He's in a bit of a panic
and already contemplating re-shoots. (I really need your help guys as I would have shot in S-Log 4K, but it was not my call,
and I don't want to become "public enemy number one" with this production company!)

Looking through the archives here, (some as old as 2012) and other searches on the internet
are yielding a lot of "how TO shoot green screen with FS7" suggestions.

Can anyone help with How to make the footage work AFTER having shot it this way??

Yikes!
 
Perhaps give Ultra in Premiere Pro a try (it's minimally going to be much faster than AE). If lighting wasn't right, you can try keying in Resolve- much more powerful and possible to get much better keys.

Here's an example which uses both ways possible in Resolve (one in Fusion, the other in Color), starting with a wrinkled poorly lit green screen:


For challenging keys, I think you'll find Resolve produces better results vs. PP or AE. Probably take less time to learn Resolve + key + render vs. trial & error in AE (can render an alpha channel video to e.g. ProRes then finish editing in PP or NLE of choice).
 
Hard to say what's going on without seeing any of the footage, but shooting HD and XAVC by itself shouldn't cause any issues.
 
Thanks guys please keep the suggestions coming, I really appreciate it.
I do think it was all lit and shot correctly.

Director is using Premier and suggested that he try "Ultra" for the key instead of AE.
He is having some better luck with the Ultra. (Thanks for that one jcs).

Can suggest to him to try Resolve, (but oh man, from the example above... does that all look complicated!)

I'm seeing a RedGiant Plug-In for After Effects called VFX PRIMATTE KEYER 6 which looks promising
it claims to do automatic keying and clean-up and has a free trial download, so I hope he gives it a try...

https://www.redgiant.com/products/vfx-suite/

(I'm surprised that a plug-in for After Effects like this exists, as I thought that is what AE is supposed to do,
but then I don't specialize in VFX).
 
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If you have access to FCP X, their keyer is very easy to use and can work well. I haven't seen any key tools have as much power/quality as that provided by Resolve (which is free: you probably don't need the paid ($300) version).
 
Cynthia Webster said:
...and I don't want to become "public enemy number one" with this production company!)

Can anyone help with How to make the footage work AFTER having shot it this way?? Yikes!
Click to expand...

As NorBro says, can you upload a small typical sample so collectively we can try to avoid Cynthia becoming Public Enemy #1

Chris Young
 
Hi Chris, providing a sample is a bit complicated as the footage is part of a known series of feature films
and the producer might have my head if I just uploaded a shot without going through the proper channels.
 
What's the directors problem with it ?

What are your video levels on person and green? Did you get any spill on the talent? What kind of lighting ? (green bulbs?)

Frizzy hair? green reflection on the talent? Is it head to toe with shadows on the floor? etc?
 
As Lenny states... lots of questions? Very hard to discern what might be the issue if any without sample footage. As others have said pretty well exposed Green or blue screen from an FS7 in Custom mode should not be an issue to key all things being equal. There again I've had complaints about screen keys on my footage as well as other shooters footage which when investigated proved to be unfounded complaints. The editors in question were just not clued up or experienced enough with the software they were using to pull a good key from good material. One one particular job I did all the keys and rendered out final composite ProRes clips for their editor to cut into the production.

Even a decent still image as an uncompressed TIFF of TARGA to download would help?

Chris Young
 
I would also recommend trying Roto Brush/Refine Edge tools in AE. It's a completely different method that helps you define and track edges and doesn't rely on wholesale chroma/luma separation to create a matte. It's a much easier process than you might think.

This might be a more effective way to deal with excessive green spill on your subject than to try to key it out. Find your edges, get your matte, then dial out the spill.

Whether you key or roto, it's usually a good idea to do a quick and dirty grade to enhance, even exaggerate the separation. Remember that this is just to get a good clean matte, and you should do the real grading later.
 
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As described to me over the phone, the edges of talent were not easily delineated.
It also sounded like there was some graininess?

This is not a green screen back spill issue on talent. Was shot 23.98 with 180 degree shutter.
They were using Prores before and had their settings adjusted for that.
So along comes my XAVC footage and I guess they expected the same settings to work.
The last that I heard yesterday evening was that they were getting better results in Premier Pro using Ultra.

They sent a couple of files to a VFX expert who sent them back looking great!
(I think he added a Canon 300 LUT in post or something?)

In the future I'm going to request an on-set test before more serious shooting gets underway.

I think there was also a degree of intense three-day shoot burn-out involved
and that they may have had more than one layer of keying set by accident.
Holding my breath that the storm has passed.

!!! Thank You All For Your Help !!!
 
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Cynthia Webster said:
Howdy!

I just spent three-days shooting green screen in custom mode
Click to expand...

Not to be picky, but this statement tells us virtually nothing about how the camera was setup and what settings were used. There are literally thousands of different combinations of custom mode settings, and a lot of them will look like crap. Add in white balance issues, exposure levels, and the lighting setup itself to add even more variables. If you want meaningful help you really must provide some original sample footage from the shoot.
 
Doug Jensen said:
Total waste of time.
Click to expand...

If one's NLE+machine can handle XAVC-I as fast as ProRes, indeed not needed. However if the NLE is slow & clunky with XAVC-I and ProRes is silky fast, that's a huge time saver and creative boost, especially when editing longer projects! Using proxies/swapping clips, the final render won't have any generation loss.

Transcoding XAVC-I to try to get "444" won't do anything- it's already RGB (444) once decoded in the NLE. There should be zero difference in keying using the original footage vs. after transcoding to ProRes 444(4). If anything, the extra transcode can lose some bits via the extra compression step (though with 4444 ProRes etc., the bitrate is very high and transcode loss is very small). Post an example if this isn't true (sounds like an NLE bug if this is happening).
 
Actually, I agree with all of this... What I'm saying is that whether you use keys or roto brush, when you set out to shape and refine your matte (by this I mean that you are actively working to affect the shape of your matte, not simply tweaking parameters in an effect/plugin), it is tremendously helpful to be in something like a ProRes 4444 (my apologies to the fourth four that I left out earlier).

I urge you to try pushing/pulling on footage to help clean up your mattes in both xavc-i and ProRes 4444. I think you'll find a noticeable , if not remarkable difference.

We might be talking about completely different approaches here toward this end, in which case I'm only arguing that it's not always a "total waste of time.”
 
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