Green or bluescreen HDV footage?
 

If so, any chance of posting up a clip in the Sample clips forum? Footage that's been shot in the HDV format, not uncompressed. Even a final composited clip would be fine.

Once I eventually get around to buying an A1 I plan on doing a lot of blue or greenscreen shots for music videos etc, most probably using the Console software. So I'm on the lookout for a few examples just so I know what kind of results to expect once I get started. I realise uncompressed through a G1 would be ideal, but that would be a bit beyond my budget.

By the way, I've seen a few posted in the JVCHD101 forum and they look promising.

Understand that the luma signal is mostly contained within the green channel, of which HDV actually has a fair amount of resolution. With the proper tweaking, it's almost like pulling a luma key. The trick is to not actually pull the key and recompress in the HDV format. Better to work in a less compressed codec which can be much kinder to the material. As a bonus, if you use Final Cut Pro, Nattress has a plug-in with chroma sharpening which can reconstruct some of the missing chroma info in order to give you better color definition for keying.

I would recommend keying in CineForm, Sheer or Uncompressed, and then when you're happy with the results you can integrate it back into an HDV timeline or better yet, a less compressed intermediate format.

Hi Barlow, yes I'll probably end up using Cineform as it converts HDV files to 4.2.2 colour space. I don't have a copy yet though. Ideally I'd prefer to do all the keying during the editing stage using Vegas as that's how I prefer to work, but may need to use a compositing app for things like fake ground shadows if I can't find a way of doing that in Vegas.

Good point about the luma. I'd never actually thought about that before. Also, I definitely won't be recompressing in HDV! Normally I'll render out my completed projects using the Huffy codec, which is a lossless codec much like Apple's Animation.

I did this luma key in my movie... came out really good.

BEFORE: http://www.citizencine.com/films/celestie/10.png

AFTER: http://www.citizencine.com/films/celestie/11.png

This is very good stuff man !!!! what compositor did you use !!!! AE / Shake !!!
there is art in there :)

we need a tutorial on the luma keying ......... can you showcase one of your compositions !!!

I used After Effects. Glad you like it :)

Yeah, very nice! Thanks for posting it up.

I love AE ....
Can you talk more about the process !!! is it a secret !!!

This is trully impressive

My hat off to you.. would love to see this in motion

Oh heck yeah, the A1 is awesome with chroma stuff, I shot a couple of tests the other day, including one at 60i which I turned into slow mo and then keyed- all worked wonderfully. I comped some stuff into a shot that was shot on 35, and it looks just like the film. This camera is amazing.

Where can I post some of these clips? I don't have a server.

Heres the actual video from the screenshots:

http://www.citizencine.com/films/celestie/clip02.mov

Cool, I'd love to see it. If you're able to encode DivX movies you can upload them for free at http://stage6.divx.com - For the tools to encode visit http://www.divx.com There are both Mac and PC encoders available for free there such as Dr DivX. The converter tool is probably the best option for encoding at 1280x720. I normally render my files using the lossless Huffy avi codec and then encode those to DivX.

Marlon, that looks brilliant! What's the movie that it's from? I'd be interested in seeing that once completed.

MORE INFO ON THE MOVIE:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...light=celestie

Looks great, and I managed to track down you original Junipero movie. Quite impressive!

Thanks :) Glad you liked it!