NEWB ALERT: Colour Key in AE CS3 - The Search for the Absolute Best Method.

Where exactly are you having problems? Also, without seeing your footage it will be difficult to diagnose it.

90% of keying comes down to your lighting and shot composition.
 
If you do enough reading Online you'll find an ever present reminder: "Keying out is rarely a perfect accomplishment"...or words to that effect. Assuming you're using Keylight with AE, using the users manual is probably the best info out there, especially once you are already in post-processing. I think the single most important thing I have found is to light the screen first. Then once that's happy, to then light your talent.
 
i am indeed using keylight. the lighting is the best it'll get at this point, but in post i simply don't have enough experience keying to know how to get around any snag - grain, artifacting, best compression methods, work-flow process, etc.

the project is this:
talking head-like 2 min online news show - graphics super-imposed in thirds based on what speaker is talking about, titles in thirds, intro and outro.
- i'm putting a digital bg in, so techniques for creating and effectively using fake backgrounds is essential.
- whether or not i should piece together a keyed shot with the other components (bg, graphics for thirds and context cued imgs) in final cut or ae.
- an essential thing i need is for the project to be scalable to an extent. that is, new topics and new "episodes" will call for different imgs superimposed etc. i need a way to streamline the creation of future episodes once the initial "pilot" is created.

thx!
 
Find a copy of Mark Christensen's "Visual Effects and Compositing" AE book. His methodology for keylight is fantastic. Amazon carries it. His updates in the CS5 edition make a good workflow really good - it's the volume to have.

If you buy the book, refer back to this post and I'll mention one thing I do differently on many shots. Where the author suggests using dual project windows to choose your screen color (one unrendered and one showing the "status" version - to find where the most pixels become transparent) I've often had better results viewing "Screen matte" over "status". It's much clearer which details could be lost or which areas that are close to the screen color might be trouble.
 
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