What are your favorite Green Screen/Keying nodes and/or strategies and why?
Some random examples:
*crok_additive_key because it does _____ the best.
*Luminance key for certain shades of green/red/blue
*3D keyer because its better than the _____ node at dark/light screens.
*_____ because its better with fly away hairs
*convert REC 709 to ACEScg first, then back to REC 709
*Semantic-Salient
etc…
Pulling together a collective of what people like/love/us for an easier way for Juniors to understand keying better!
IBK (much better if you can generate your own clean plate)
3D Keyer (harder to learn but easier to control than the MasterKeyer)
Favorite colour suppression -
MasterKeyer (hands down my favorite supression. Watch out for pushing it too far. Look out for the opposite colour sneaking in)
Favorite core matte key -
3D Keyer (again I like that I can select more tolerance and less softness for a fill/core matte. Don’t forget that you can also key colours in the FG subject not just the chroma screen in the BG)
General Advice
Additive keying is a great technique to learn but it won’t solve everything and it can always introduce different problems that need solving. Have as many tricks up your sleeve that you can have a go with. You can grade your plate or swap colour spaces just to help your keying work better. Pulling the key is only half the battle. You need to treat your edges.
Honorable mentions -
Pixel spread (holy cow I love this node)
YUV Keyer (my go to for Luma keys. I just like the way you can select a tolerance and then soften out from there. Switch off the U and the V and just use Y)
I use the masterkeyer a whole lot, always key in log for it and am very pleased by my results most times for a soft key. I use keyer 3d for hard mattes/core mattes. Every once in a while I’ll make my own clean plate and use the IBK keyer, but I’m impatient, so most times this is a last resort thing for me.
For suppression, I like to use the masterkeyer and then use that to generate an additive key just for my suppressed fill edges, filling it in with a hard key of the untouched original plate. This fill gets comped over the BG with my key. I never use just an additive key as a comp, but have no malice against those that do. I just find I have more control with the adaptive suppression I’m talking about above.
Also, this trick I saw from @randy has saved me a lot of pain when MK suppression gives you weird magentas or greens.
Sometimes I will make a massive Pixel Spread but then switch to log and use a Photoshop blend mode called Colour (comp node), that will wash the colour from my extra large Pixel Spread over my image.
A great/fast way to wash edges with your subjects colour and remove spill.
I am thinking of an example with a person on green. They need a colour suppression that works for their hair, their skin and maybe the clothes. I could gmask sections and grade the colour suppression separately.
Or I pick a general suppression colour, what ever the MasterKeyer coughs out, and then I pixel spread so that the edges of the skin, hair and jumper (bright yellow) expand out into my fine edge matte.
It looks ridiculous because now my nostrils and eyebrows are all out of position. The edges look great but the detail of the person is unnatural.
Comp node. Switch from Flame to Photoshop blend modes and select colour. Front - PixelSpread. Back - result of MaskerKeyer CC.
All of my luminace comes back, nostrils and eyebrows etc… but now the edges have been washed with brown for the hair, pink (skin) for the face and yellow for jumper.
