To find out how HDV will do for chromakey....

[Kaku Ito]

I'm working on a business for Reflecmedia with the Japanese distributor right now and they kindly provided a set for us to test this week.

I will shoot some stuff with this set and provide all of you the chromakey ready m2t file to play around with whatever NLE software you use.

I'm not that specialized in shooting chormakey ready footage but this system seems to require minimum knowledge. But of course with the help of people with the specialized knowledge, people in every level might find it valuable. I will shoot and provide the footage with not much experience in shooting blueback and we will see how much improvement we can make by getting information from you.

[Mark Kubat]

Since Vegas natively handles m2t's and has half-decent chromakeyer, I suppose this could be one of the "purest" ways to assess the feasibility of chromakeying m2t's so far... I guess I could also try somehow "downconverting" to avi to bring into adobe after effects with keylight plugin...

man, one thing's for sure - the software support for this hdv stuff is going to have to come around.

On a whim, I rendered out in vegas from m2t>mpeg2 NTSC video stream in one go and burned to DVD and compared to m2t>NTSC avi>mpeg2 NTSC video DVD and boy, was there a difference with the former looking visibly superior to the latter! I'm convinced the less "converting" the better - okay, I know the Cineform stuff is supposed to be way cool but I'll be signing up for a trial once I get my HDR-FX1 and there's a trial download that's FX1 ready...

[Rob Lohman]

Kaku: reflecmedia has a very interesting product. I've seen it
demonstrated a couple of times, impressive. Let us know how
your tests go and how you like there product please. Thanks!

[Kaku Ito]

I placed a 38.5MB m2t file with blueback created with Reflecmedia.

Please note that, although I had some association with few jobs that I helped, this is my first time to shoot for chromakey.

I had a couple of lights from the front spreaded apart for about 1.2 meters to each other. So, it was very simple, just the matter of generally getting decent lighting and spread the Chromaflex, placed the LiteRing on HDR-FX1 and adjust the amount of blue light and shoot.

If your software does not have good chromakey plug-in, the try out the mattenee in your software. You can download the demo version.

I would like to than Mr. Nagai from HONJO & Co.,, Reflecmedia and Mr. Nakamura from VideoAlfa for this opportunity.

This file is shot in a typical bedroom (more American size, not Japanese size) at CreativeSuite.

And the most of all, I'd liked to thank chacha for her cooperation. chacha/cocoon

[Rob Lohman]

Kaku: that's one of the nice things about reflecmedia, it doesn't
require "traditional" blue/green screen lighting (as you know)!

Where did you place that file?

[Kaku Ito]

Oh the same kakugyo folder on HDVinfo.net

http://www.hdvinfo.net/media/kakugyo/

[Daniel Broadway]

Can someone post a frame grab of this for me to try it out? I'm in college right now studying to be a visual effects compositor, so I wanted to give it a try.

[Kaku Ito]

Dainel,

Maybe I shoould convert it to numbered picts format for a short time.
It would involve some encoding scheme but does any one have good idea for the workflow on Mac?

[Daniel Broadway]

Well, all I would need is a Bitmap of a frame. I have been able to successfully pull professional level keys from DV with hair and motion blur, I just want to be able to do it from HDV as well.

Kaku, I'm not sure if you already knew this, but it helps to turn the sharpness level down to zero, or possibly even down to -2. Edge Enhancement on cameras can be extremely problematic for blue/greenscreen composites. But you probably already knew that.

[Mark Kubat]

okay, folks - I'll get a shot at doing this on Tuesday afternoon, EST.

Wow - sounds exciting - anybody get a PAL FX1E yet?

[Rob Lohman]

I did a small test with Vegas 5 and the builtin Chroma Keyer and
it worked PERFECT (after setting the low and high sliders futher
to the middle and near eachother and adding some softening).

Thanks Kaku!

p.s. it would probably be better to do it with green since MPEG2
also favors that sampling as does DV.

[Kaku Ito]

Rob,

Thank you for your advice. Unfortunately, we are provided only with the medium size blue LiteRing for now, but I will talk to HONJO & Co., to provide me the green one.

[Alex Raskin]

I also did a quick down-and-dirty bluescreen key using PremierePro 1.5's own keyer. Worked well. I'm sure Ultimatte would be even better, but I haven't had the time.

This positive result is all the more interesting as I saw a slight blue halo that contoured the singer's body in the original footage posted, so my initial thought was that the bluescreen will not be good. But it was.

Thanks Kaku!

By the way: I operated with the footage by simply renaming the m2t file into mpg and then importing into PPro.

My usual trick that I employ with JVC video files - making a Program Stream mpg out of the original m2t using HDTV2MPEG utility - did NOT work this time. Apparently, HDTV2MPEG does not like something (resolution? GOP structure?) in FX1's m2t files...

[Daniel Broadway]

Can someone please post a frame for me to try as well?

[Kaku Ito]

Daniel,

chachastill.png is the file you've been waiting for.

This file was captured with Lumiere HD (m2t), converted with MPEGstream to Blackmagic uncompressed HD 8bit file and saved as still withing Final Cut Pro HD's save as QuickTime function.