Final Cut Studio 2 - Chroma Keying

[Jon Fairhurst]

So... Which package (Motion? Color? FCP6?) includes Chroma keying? Or is their top keyer a separate purchase? And how's it rate?

Thanks!

[Theodore McNeil]

My understanding is that you can still do chroma key in FCP 6. However, you can also do it Color as well.

[Nate Schmidt]

Motion has some chroma key ability, but right now Shake is Apple's high end keyer, and they are currently replacing it with something new :D

[Cole McDonald]

I wouldn't imagine that color would contain a keyer. FCP does and motion does. Shake has good ones too, and if you're a student or have access to a corporate discount, the price is *really* good.

[Jon Fairhurst]

Very nice. My son (the editor) has a Mac laptop, and is a student. We use Vegas for editing, but it looks like we can go between Vegas and Shake easily enough. It looks like an amazing package for the $250 student price.

[Cole McDonald]

absolutely incredible piece of software with a really high learning curve and very few video tutorials out on the net yet...hopefully that'll change.

[Greg Quinn]

Is the keying in Shake at the same quality as Serious Magic Ultra or Ultimatte Advantedge? I've got Shake and it looks fairly basic, although you can control most every aspect of the key.

[Jon Fairhurst]

Originally Posted by Greg Quinn

Is the keying in Shake at the same quality as Serious Magic Ultra or Ultimatte Advantedge? I've got Shake and it looks fairly basic, although you can control most every aspect of the key.

It's the control that is the key.

Ultimatte made their name with color supression and additive keying. That's what to strive for. It's pretty simple:

1) Create the key signal from detecting your keying color. Let's assume it's green.
2) Soften, filter, grow or shrink your key for a nice blend.
3) Multiply the key by the background to cut the hole for your foreground.
4) Subtract green from your foreground. This leaves shadows, hair and such. It can also remove unintended spill.
5) Add the foreground and background together.

Note that the key is never multiplied by the foreground. Also the green removal from the foreground and the key signal can use different parameters. That allows you to, say, remove spill without showing the background, and to show a shadow without removing the background.

[Theodore McNeil]

Just to correct something above - I said you could chroma key in Color. I meant Motion. Pretty hard to confuse the two but somehow I managed to...

From what I saw at the Apple booth at NAB. You can do a quick and not-so dirty editing, compositing, color correction and audio edit all in Final Cut Pro 6.

BUT... If you want to have more control and/or do a more professional work you add Motion, Color and Soundtrack Pro to your workflow.

It's like they're giving you the prosumer, intermediate level programs all in one package and let you can sort out what you want to use. And if you want to go up from there, you have to get out your wallet again: Pro Tools, Shake, etc...

And to be fair... Adobe, Avid and Sony had similar packages.

[Jon Fairhurst]

So... my son downloaded the Shake demo, but it requires a higher resolution and more memory than his laptop has.

The memory is just a matter of money - buy it and plug it in.

QUESTION: Which memory should he get for a Mac Book? He probably doesn't want to pay Apple Store prices.

Regarding the monitor, the Mac Book doesn't let you increase the resolution. However... he found a trick on the net that lets you unlock it. He's now running dual monitors at full resolution on his Windows Desktop PC's LCD monitor. How's that for cool?

Anyway, once he upgrades the memory, he can try out the Shake demo.

We appreciate any memory suggestions.

[Cole McDonald]

what kind of power book? Not being able to hit the correct resolution sounds pretty oldish.