Nikon D7100 Keying test

Michael Carter

Michael Carter

Veteran
I had a green screen up for some product shots, gave the D7100 a shot before I struck the set.

Really not bad for a DSLR... hair's a problem. Fought a hard double-edge on the shoulder but didn't really dial this in.

You've really got to pre-render your footage through Neat Video though, with Keylight's "Spill Suppressor" (which should really be called "Noise Amplifier"). Or go to "intermediate result" and try AE's suppressor, which is hit & miss.

I've got to say - my AVCHD AC130 is in the same ballpark as the 7100, quite a surprise for a DSLR - neither of 'em's a RED though. But either way, I've about had it with compressed cameras for keying. BMC RAW, here I come.

 
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Not bad at all, thanks for the test.
But yes, the BMC, with much more detail and no color subsampling or even codec artifacts, and in a setting where shallow DoF is not a must, should be a lot better (I've shot green screen with it but I still haven't seen the results!)
 
Not to mention a bigger frame size for downsampling. A lot of my heavy-keying gigs, I tell the client they'd really better consider 720p final...

Still, the D7100 footage is really clean. I've tried to key first-gen canon (T2i, etc) a couple times... it ain't pretty. It's doable without hair & fine detail, but this is a significant step up. And the stills are phenomenal.

I'm going to rent a BMC before long. I don't think I'll buy any more cameras for some time (except for the pocket cam, kind of a no-brainer). Wider glass, a speedbooster, and a really nice SDI/HDMI Retina viewfinder so I can rent Epic, Red One, BMC, whatever. Now that even Scarlets and Epics are on the lens rental sites, it should be great for budgeted projects with keying or (Red) needing extreme slowmo.
 
I played with it a bit more last night... put an instance of hue-saturation before keylight and set it to greens, played with the balance of the screen. Hair held up even better. Really kind of shocked to see an APS-C DSLR key this well.
 
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