Key out black

Hawk Teflon

Hawk Teflon

Veteran
I have some fire with a black background (detonationfilms.com), and they say to use the Screen transfer. It works, kinda. It makes it really washed out and faded looking. The fire doesn't look like fire anymore. Is there a better way?
 
Go to keying and choose "Luma". Enter a THRESHOLD value and the black background should disappear. The higher the threshold value, the more black it removes, but too much and your fire will lose all detail (see my twilight entry, "The Contract" for proof).

I made my own flame elements for the film, but when there was a big blaze, the black background began to reflect the light from the flames. That's why the threshold had to be cranked to make the background disappear. Unfortunately, the flames lost all detail in the process.

I'm confident you won't have this issue with the elements from detonation films.
 
Neal Buconjic said:
Go to keying and choose "Luma". Enter a THRESHOLD value and the black background should disappear. The higher the threshold value, the more black it removes, but too much and your fire will lose all detail (see my twilight entry, "The Contract" for proof).

I made my own flame elements for the film, but when there was a big blaze, the black background began to reflect the light from the flames. That's why the threshold had to be cranked to make the background disappear. Unfortunately, the flames lost all detail in the process.

I'm confident you won't have this issue with the elements from detonation films.
Click to expand...

I had to get a Threshold of 61 to get rid of all of the surrounding black, which ended up killing half the flame.
 
For black backgrounds use either add or screen "blending mode" on that layer when dealing with fire which matt said.
 
Hmm, yeah that seems to be the main consensus. Unfortunately, the footage is light colored, and screen works best with darks.
 
You could also duplicate your screened in fire to beef things up a bit. Generally extract/luma keys get pretty noisy, so some more experimenting with blend modes will be your best bet. You can also hit shift= to cycle through the blend modes on whatever layer is highlighted so you can see pretty quickly what looks good...
 
I didn't know about that shift trick. Nice. Thanks.

As for duplicating the layer, it makes the colors very washed out. The flames from the fire are almost white with just a hint of red or orange with as few as two layers. I'm trying to get that rich hot red color to stay in there. CCing it hasn't helped much as of yet, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.
 
Try maybe layering with the background on the bottom, a fire instance using lighten, then one using screen on top of that. I got some decent results, but I was just using a still of fire on black off google images.
 
Matt Grunau said:
Knoll Unmult, or Add/Linear Dodge blending mode.
Click to expand...

**UPDATE** After trying about 15 different things (add, screen, dup'd add's and screens, adds on screens, luma key, add on luma, screen on luma, etc) I checked out unmult. Something about their wording made me think it was a trial, and I didn't want to pay for something unless I had to. It wasn't a trial. This plug-in is amazing. Get it.

Seriously. Get it.

Matt just saved me many many hours. Thank you!
 
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