> Boris have a pretty good one by all accounts and there's Keylight which is free with After Affects.

I would add that NewBlueFX just shipped a nice chroma keyer in their Video Essentials II package. The spill suppression is particularly good. That would be your least expensive option. The next least expensive would be Boris FX and then Keylight 1.2 in After Effects.

I would download the trial of NewBlueFX Video Essentials II and try it out.

~jr

By complex I mean its not just a guy in front of a screen. it was an attempt to key out a back wall of a room- so there are uneven surfaces a some shadows here and there plus some green cast fell on sections of the "room" like the furniture.


I might be able to duplicate tracks and do some masking with different treatments but I guess looking at the products mentioned could help too


thanks

what about all those VS Adobe - Ultra?

Ultra is very good. Seeing as how I kind of got it for freeI cannot complain. However it excels at somethings, keying DV and HDV footage and has lots of other tools and virtual sets etc.

But go back a bit. Chroma Key is not the only way to extract a key. You can also use a difference mask. I doubt it's going to help in your case but learn about it and have it in your arsenal of tools. There's also luminance keys. Vegas does all of those but you need to roll your own.

At the end of the day and as I've learned after doing a bit of research and testing the best tool can oftenly be to simply cut your loses and go back and shoot it right. You need a lot of space and a lot of lights to get a truly good CK. It's very common also to use more than one chroma key, it's very rarely a one button click, don't think you might not have to spend a lot of time manually masking to get a good key.

Bob.

I have been using Boris FX for chroma key on my current project and it is miles ahead of the stock Sony chroma keyer. Having said that, it is by no means perfect. It seems to only want to do rectangular garbage mattes. I'm getting around this by adding extra edges with the wire masker but I shouldn't have to. I am also having memory problems when I put to many concurrent Boris FX filters on the timeline. I am working on a project where a bunch of different children are reading the same script and I'm chroma keying all of them in order to pop in lots of different faces as the script progresses. This means that I have gobs and gobs of chroma key filters on the same timeline and Vegas is running out of memory.

I imagine the New Blue chroma keyer is 64 bit compatible. That would probably fix my memory problems right there on a project like this.

What about CineGobs? (http://www.cinegobs.com/)

I've never used it, but I've seen the website and it's free. Heck, since it's free you could at least try it. If you do, let me know because I'd like to know how it compares.

CineGobs doesn't work on my computer.

In any case, it is so much more convenient to use a chroma key plugin like Boris FX or the New Blue options, especially in HDV where you have codec issues when trying to use an external program. Boris FX works really well until you have thirty or forty instances of it running at once. I now have blue and greens screen presets that are 90% of the way there before you even start tweaking.

OK I just downloaded the NewBlue FX Video Essentials 2 demo and am trying out the chroma keyer. It is obviously better than the stock Sony chroma key filter that comes with Vegas, but I don't have nearly the control to get the sort of results that I can with Boris FX. From what I'm seeing so far, they're not even in the same ball park results wise.

For now at least, I would say that Boris FX (or Boris Red as a Vegas plugin) is the king of Vegas plugin chroma keying.

> From what I'm seeing so far, they're not even in the same ball park results wise.

To be fair, you must also say the same thing about the price. So the chroma keyer in the $79 tool suite (VE II) is not as sophisticated as the chroma keyer in the $299 tools suite (Boris FX). Is anyone surprised? I would hope that this is what you would have expected.

I would have to say that someone doing a lot of chroma keying would be well served by purchasing Boris FX. However, someone who does the occasional chroma key and wants something better than what Vegas has but doesn't want to break the wallet, would be well served by the chroma keyer in Video Essentials II.

~jr

I bought the NewBlue Essentials II pack for the Chroma Keyer. I does a good job and a little better than Vegas. I need to practice more using it. I do about 4 Chroma Key jobs a year. I should have 2 chroma key jobs in late October so that probably will be the first time I use it. I will have plenty of time to practice on my test footage!

It seems to me that regardless of how much or little you use an effect like chroma key, you want to get the best results possible. With the stock Vegas chroma key filter, the results aren't good enough for me to use even once a year. An image with a green halo and chunks missing from the hairline isn't something I want to use ever. The New Blue Video Essentials 2 chroma keyer isn't a heck of a lot better.

This whole idea of "well it's good enough if you only use it occasionally" seems kind of foreign to me. I try not to overuse any of my effects, and there are many that I use "only occasionally". That doesn't mean that I am satisfied if they aren't top notch. To my eyes, the only Vegas chroma key plugin that is worth using even occasionally is the Boris FX one. It's not perfect either, but it is on par with what I see in other professional grade production. The other options simply are not.

Using Adobe Ultra here. Works terrific.

The keyer in Boris Red 4 is also very good.

I think Ultra is better. Has lots more settings to tweak.

I've even keyed folks wearing white lab coats on a near white background. It wasn't the greatest key, but it it did work for its' purpose.

> It seems to me that regardless of how much or little you use an effect like chroma key, you want to get the best results possible. ...This whole idea of "well it's good enough if you only use it occasionally" seems kind of foreign to me.

You missed my point so let me make it a different way: If you only used Chroma key once a year would you be willing to pay $1,400 for a plug-in? (probably not) How about if you used it every day? (if your work was mostly chroma key, I would think yes). So I equated "occasional use" with "how much would you be willing to pay" for a solution. It's always a trade-off between price and quality. Ultimatte at $1,400 is better than KeyLight in After Effects at $999 which is better than Boris FX at $299 which is better than Video Essentials II at $79 which is better than the Vegas keyer. It's all relative to how much you are willing to pay for a tool. That was my point. Sometimes, what I can afford is "good enough" whether I like it or not and the VE II keyer is not bad at all. It does not give "instant" results like Boris FX and KeyLight, and you do have to tune it a bit to get the desired results.

> The New Blue Video Essentials 2 chroma keyer isn't a heck of a lot better.

I disagree... it is leaps and bounds better than the stock Vegas chroma key. It has spill suppression which Vegas does not have, it has a matte choker which Vegas does not have, and it does a much better job than the Vegas chroma keyer once you understand how to fine tune it. I've used it on some hard to key footage of a drummer where the green screen was reflecting in the cymbals and VE II spill suppression removed the spill quite nicely. The Vegas keyer could have never done that.

I'm not comparing VE II with Boris FX because you are right, the Boris keyer is a lot better. I'm just saying that people shouldn't discount the VE II keyer just because there are more costly keyers that do a better job. It does a pretty good job for it's price range for people who can't afford something better.

~jr

Point well taken JR. On the other hand, quality and price are not always correlated. Examples of this would be the excellent AAV Colorlab plugin and the last two deshaker scripts, all of which are top notch quality even though they are free. Another example is the Pegasus PicVideo which is far better than it's extremely low price would have you expect.

Would you agree that at this point, if you want to stay within Vegas, that Boris (either red or FX) is the best quality option? This is important to me because with my HDV footage, a Vegas plugin keeps me from having to transcode the footage into some other format, process it in that format, then import it into Vegas. This is not only extremely time consuming, but uses orders of magnitude more disc space. I really like to stay within the Vegas world whenever it is at all possible.

> Would you agree that at this point, if you want to stay within Vegas, that Boris (either red or FX) is the best quality option?

Yup, I agree. I was really impressed with the Boris chroma keyer. I use it all the time. ;-)

~jr

Are the Boris FX Light Wrap and Color Match plugins usable inside of Vegas as well? I have found similar plugins inside of Affer Effects and Commotion Pro invaluble for pulling off realistic keys.