advanced keying / spill suppression

[Anonymous]

hey flamies,

at this point i would like to share an advanced setup for keying and spill suppression.
the footage frame used here is from the film "hugo" by martin scorsese.
main postproduction company was pixomondo.

the challange during this show was, that mr. scorsese wanted us to get rid of the green spill
but to avoid any colour change of the plate. to make this task a little more interresting
we had a lot of smoke in front of the green screen, reflecting metals and of course
some motion blur.

to make a long story short, pixomondo did a stunning job and received an oscar 2012 for the
vfx work done on hugo.

but as most companies in the feature industry they are using nuke mostly, so i was interrested
if i could recreate a shot on flame, and by using flame i mean "out of the box" of course, without
using keylight or any other spark.

so here is the setup, it is so simple that it hurts.
use the master keyer, pick any colour you like. switch on spill suppression. go to the colour selector of the spill suppression and slide the green or blue slider to 100% (1023 in case of 16bit float) and the other colours to 0. change the output from result (comp) to frontCC.
so at this point you only get a plate where the green is gray.
now get a logic ops and substract the original from the key out. what you receive now is the green only, swaping the inputs returns the suppression colour, in this case purple.
now that you have your green and your plate seperated you can do with the green what ever you want, and by adding (logic ops - add) it back you receive exactly your plate.
so if you i.e. change the hue of your green and then add back you only change the hue of your
green screen, not the hue of the rest of your plate.
changing the hue is of course the simpelest task and i only used it to keep the setup simple.
you can of course use a mono, select the green channel and multiply this with your background
(maybe you want to blur your background first) and then add it back on your plate and your spill
changes the colour to your background colour. or you use the green channel as a key only for the transperent parts of your plate (like smoke, motionblur or soft edges)

i am sure when you guys play around with this setup you will find many more usefull things you
can do with it.
for me it was just fun to find out how to convert a nuke approach to flame and to see that
it works with the same level of quality.

video tutorial available here: https://vimeo.com/62523139

[Anonymous]

hi ,
i'g like to see your setup...

my mail is:
ntelis@gmail.com

[Steve_Curley]

Email addresses are suppressed by the forum s/ware - to help prevent "harvesting" by "bots". If you really want it to be visible you'll have to "munge" it:-
someonesomewhereelse.

[Anonymous]

Hi mate,

can i apply the same setup via Smoke 2011 / 2013?

I'm a nube but was having problems keying motion blur on green screen via Action. I tried pulling a hard edged key and a soft edge key and try to combine both as layers rather than moduler keyer in Action.

I'm still getting dark grey haloing where the blur is.
The motion is basically a finger scrolling down on a tablet.

[Anonymous]

hey funkyrobbin,

when u r talkink about smoke on linux you definately can do the same thing. if u r on smoke on mac
then i dont know, coz i ve never installed smac2013.

but when you have a dark halo around your key then you can try to do unpremultiply or additive over.
for unpremultiply this function is not directly accessable in flame like it is in nuke. just use yout front and matte and then do a logic ops with divide. use this new front with your matte and do your over, sometimes this is already enough. the other option to avoid dark halo is to use an additive over. this function is only available in action. on older systems it was called add.
now with the new systems the add is a simple add and the original add that you need to use is called like punchback...something.
i hope this helps a little.

[ollieslats]

I would love to have the set-up
Thanks

GregorypaulbecknerATmacDOTCom

[Anonymous]

Hey thanks for the tip! Love to see the setup. djf0057@yahoo.com

[Anonymous]

djf0057(at)yahoo(dot)com Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Hey,
Thanks for the tut, please send me your setup
wojtekku(at)hotmail(dot)com

[Anonymous]

Very nice! Thanks... I would love to see your setup.

[Anonymous]

So nice! Thanks for the trick

[Anonymous]

Please toss your setup this way. Thanks much!

James

daquake (at) gmail (dot) com

[Anonymous]

I would also like the setup please. z(dot)dych(at)yahoo(dot)com

THANKS!

[matt_riley]

I would appreciate having the setup. Thank you!

mattrileymegmailcom

[matt_riley]

I'd be willing to host the file for you so you don't have to manually deal with requests. 🙂

-Matt

[Anonymous]

thanks! would love to see the setup

wenkoff(at)gmail(dot)com

cheers!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

sorry for responding so late.

i made a quick tutorial to see how to setup this despill - for those who are interested, i did it for smoke and nuke
in the same tutorial. if you are only dealing with smoke just watch the first part.

here is the link:

https://vimeo.com/62523139

i hope this helps.
i am not using smoke on mac to often so please bare with me that i handle it like a noob 😉

[Anonymous]

Nice vimeo demo from peppermintpost above... thanks for that.

Simon.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing this technique. I'm an editor who's recently started using Smoke, and I actually tried pulling a key on the clip you used in your tutorial as practice before coming across this post. Mine was awful. So I found your video to be very helpful and also pretty humbling.

Sandeep.

[Anonymous]

peppermintpost,

I wish to heap many, many thanks upon you for sharing this technique.  I have been struggling with transparency & motion blur for quite some time now and this has helped me out a TON!

But I do have one question.  I built your example (with the HCW footage) and used a similar Background shot of an outdoor vista, but then I swapped the BG for an indoor shot of a church and suddenly I couldn't get the luma setting on the spill suppression to give me a satisfactory result for both the edges of her skin, and her hair.

Either the skin would have a dark halo/shadow or the hair would have a bright halo, I couldn't find a happy balance between the two.  If you were doing this comp and tryinig to hit the quality bar of a feature film, like Hugo, would you roto the hair (and dark areas) separate from the lighter skin and use a different suppression setup for just those areas?  Or is there a mathematical way of dealing with this?

This is the BG I tried http://i.imgur.com/N2CtCyo.jpg

Cheers & many thanks!

_Chris