greenscreen stills
 

What's a good way to grab a frame with the background already made transparent via chroma-key? When I click copy to clipboard, I get the black background in my graphics program (paintshop). It also suffers from the jaggies and looks like it has anti-alaising turned off. I've also tried turning the field type to none but not getting very good results. Looking for high-quality stills from an AVCHD source. Running VP10c. Thanks.

Re: greenscreen stills
 

It sounds like the keying you used made a poor job of it - it's the matting out process that is critical not what you do after. If it has jagged edges the keying was poor. Could have been so many things - if you post a pic from the original green screen we can have a look.

Re: greenscreen stills
 

I noticed it's worse when I saturate the green.
Here's a raw frame with the fields set to none.

Re: greenscreen stills
 

Caveat: I've never tried this. Does Vegas support transparency in still caps?

Here are a couple things to try:

1. Make sure you're capturing to a still format that supports transparency. JPG doesn't. PNG does.
2. Be sure you're set on best/full when you cap. I know it was important with older versions of Vegas Pro, but IIRC this might have been fixed at some point.

Re: greenscreen stills
 

Yes, I did all that initially.
I'm very surprised it doesn't support transparency.

Re: greenscreen stills
 

Well... it does for video rendering.

For the very few codecs that support transparency, Vegas works. Not sure I've gotten DNxHD to work with transparency in Vegas, but I've had success with uncompressed.

Which may be a possibility for you, depending on the goals of your project. How about a 1-frame export uncompressed AVI?

Possibly MOV in animation + / millions + might work as well. The codec supports transparency, but not sure about how Vegas works with this.

Re: greenscreen stills
 

I'm confused - is that a full resolution image? No way that is ever going to key properly. There aren't any clean edges in the image - has something gone adrift in the still capture?

Re: greenscreen stills
 

It's a frame copied to clipboard from VP then compressed in paintshop for an example.
I'll have to stay in VP, evidently, and perhaps use a better plugin.
I don't think any are free, though.

Re: greenscreen stills
 

It's mangled in Paintshop, the frame size is still pretty high as is the file size - can you extract a frame and not compress it - because whatever you did looks really bad, not clean at all. Not sure what happened?

I think I just realised what you did - you need to export the image as a frame, not a screen capture because that isn't the real image quality at all.

If you can't do that, how about just exporting 5 seconds of the video from the camera - then we could try the image on our suffering systems and see how it keys. Difficult to see from the screen grab, but there don't appear to be shadows, but there could be a bit of green spill from the screen on the edge, which might account for it?

Re: greenscreen stills
 

You can render an image sequence in Pro 10 (several formats to choose from) so that's another workaround for you to consider.
BTW, Pro 10 went up to 10.0e at the end so I recommend an upgrade to that just for the bug fixes alone and there were a lot in 10.0d and 10.0e.
Sony Creative Software - Download: Updates: Vegas

Re: greenscreen stills
 

Not sure what happened but I rendered an image sequence of one frame as a png and it shows a transparent background in Windows picture viewer. I then open it in paintshop and the transparency doesn't display. I think paintshop may be a little wonky.