"Ah, that's where my main concern is: hair"

I shot a couple of chroma keys shots with my 550D at NAB that were very well lit.
I used the faithful preset with sharpening set at 2. I think if I had set the sharpness to 0 the key would have been a little better.

I then used Keylight with Fusion 6 to try and pull a key. The stair stepping was unbelievably bad! I got a little better key using Fusion's Ultrakey.
I have been pulling high end keys for years and this is some of the worst footage I ever saw for chroma keying. I can pull a much better key with Beta SP.

After I messed around with the footage for 1/2 hour or so I got a decent key, but nothing I would brag about.
I have pulled chroma keys with Red that were infinitely better. Test before you do a paying job!

Shot this promo with a hand painted green canvas in my garage over a year ago, just a week after I got the Canon 5D. This shot keyed so well, and just in Vegas, done in about 5 minutes. I had tried similar shots with my FX1 and HV20 footage , and it was always a bear. Admittedly some green spill neeeded some cleaning up, but for a quick dirty job, I was amazed how easy this went.

Try something with fine hair detail and report back. :)

This short 30" was all done with the 7D and ex-1. Most green shots with 7D. Not particular problems with it. Also consider that keying was done with Vegas, without any external plug-ins. I did find easier to get "clean" edges with the ex-1, but 7D was workable as well. I am also attaching a photo of the green screen setup (incomplete - we are getting the floor section of it on thurs).

Carlo Zanella
The Santa Fe TV Show

Carlos,

The attached image appears to be a still picture not a frame from the video therefore it tells me nothing about how the video keys.

In the video, the keys of the girl look pretty poor (perhaps it's Vimeo).

And the tennis racket looks poor too....

I believe this article has been discussed somewhere on the forums, but I thought it was relevant to this thread.

Canon T2i/550D HDMI Output Footages Jay Friesen's Blog

summary: It seems that the hdmi output (which cannot be recorded while you are recording on the camera) produces uncompressed video (much better for keying).

caveot: you can't get some of the display stuff off the screen so you have to crop your video down to 720p to make it work.

PS. Chris: nice work on that promo.

So...on a T2i, you can't record externally from the HDMI without getting the heads up display on the clip? Can't you shut it off?

You don't happen to know whether it's possible to shut down any similar status displays on a 5D?

It seems like it's screaming for a Flash Nano...or a KiPro as an external recorder to me.

That's what I'm wondering. How frustrating to have that forced upon us! I suppose we can hope that a Magic Lantern firmware for the T2i (if it ever emerged) would solve that problem. ;-/


The KiPro is precisely what I was thinking too.

This is from a shoot I did to compare between the 5D and the pany hpx2000. (ignore the motion tracked mustache) I had no problems keying it. just convert your footage to prores 422 LT and you should be fine

Our most recent short (below) uses green screen extensively throughout the final scene (shot on a 5DmkII). We didn't have a lot of fine hair or anything to worry about, and we weren't going for realism with the effect, but it worked reasonably well. I did run into some issues though - there were fine lines in the key edges that almost reminded me of interlace artifacts despite the fact that it was progressive footage. I believe they are a result of the 4:2:0 color sampling, and was able to minimize them with a 1 pixel vertical blur in the blue channel. We converted directly to Prores and worked with that footage in AE using keylight - I suspect adding an intermediate noise-reduction pass with neat video or the like during the initial conversion process would improve the results. This was made as part of a timed competition though and we didn't have time to wait for the render.

Hardest part we had was keeping good looking edges between both sharp foreground elements and out of focus background elements. Settings that looked good for the foreground would result in too hard an edge where the soft background edge should blend into the plate, but fixing that would give us a fuzzy edge on the parts that should have been in sharp focus. Not sure if this is due to something specific in the camera footage or just a general problem with shallow DOF and green screen.