Trouble keying around hair

[mrose]

I've had no luck getting a good key around a subject with stringy hair. Admittedly, our lighting and setup wasn't as good as it could have been, but I'm wondering if anyone has any tips? I've tried different keying approaches in Final Cut and AE with no luck. I'm not particularly experienced with either program, so I very well could be missing some tactics.

I've uploaded a portion of the original video file on a separate forum that you can look at. Thanks for the help!

[poisondeathray]

What problems are you having specifically ? Is it preserving hair edge detail ? spill ? noise ? something else ?

Have you tried a multipass key ? Typically you need at least one for a solid core matte and another to preserve fine hair edge details, possibly even more.

Even with "ideal" lighting , setup, good recording conditions, rarely do you ever get a perfect 1 click key

[mrose]

Hi there. Edge detail is my issue. When I've applied a key, I've been losing the strands of her hair that stick out, and it's kind of distracting. I've tried a multi-pass key (this was entirely new to me) and I'm still having a lot of trouble with the strands and frizzy parts. It seems like the keyer is recognizing those areas as the same color as the background (so I guess spill is an issue here as well)

[poisondeathray]

I'm hoping that' s not your "original" footage, just a re-encoded version - it's salvagable but the compression issues , noise and lighting make you have to do more work than you should have to

IMO, keylight if very finicky, especially with noisy footage and green spill and certain lighting conditions . It would take several passes to do a good job on that, and it's supression tends to add noise (you have to use "intermediate" mode plus another method)

Do you have primatte ? What I would do here is stretch the contrast first (it makes keying around dark hair easier) , then use primate with another spill suppression method (internal spill supresson with keylight, primatte tend not to be as good) . It will be faster, less work with primatte to retain good hair detail

[mrose]

Poison - I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with primatte?

[poisondeathray]

It doesn't come with AE, it's a 3rd party plugin for AE. Many people feel it's a superior keyer for some situations. (It is IMO, I just tried on your sample. Keylight is good, but not for everything)
https://www.redgiant.com/products/primatte-keyer/

[mrose]

Can you share what the sample looked like using Primatte? I'd love to see the difference between it and Keylight. I don't believe we have it, but could be worth acquiring.

[poisondeathray]

I'm right in the middle of a big render, but I can upload something later tonight or tomorrow if you're still interested. What did you want to see exactly, a finished composite ? hair matte ?

But in the meantime just give the free trial a shot - you won't be sorry (and I'm not affliated with Red Giant in any way) . And don't just take my word for it, search various forums about reviews on Primatte before you consider purchasing. Some people just don't like it for whatever reason, or maybe they are more used to keylight workflow. But to get keylight to work on this - you would need more layers , passes and fidgeting than primatte . There are many tutorials on youtube/vimeo and similar sites on using primatte . It's not "perfect" either, there are some shots where keylight is better on . But primatte excels at soft mattes and hair detail (you still have to do core mattes, garbage mattes etc..., but the hair edge soft matte will be much easier to get than in keylight)

Also, BTW Nuke has a free version now , and I think it has both primatte and keylight as well. But the learning curve is more steep, and you have to familiarize yourself with nodal workflows if you aren't already familiar.

[mrose]

A composite would be great if you are able. And I will check out the trial. Appreciate all the help!

[poisondeathray]

Did you have a chance to play with primatte yet ? (I was wrong about nuke - apparently the free version of nuke has the primatte node disabled)

Here is a 1:1 cropped hair key with 2 layers, and a rough garbage matte. You can get away with just 1 main layer; but the 2nd is to add back a bit of hair detail on the actor's right. It still needs a bit of work (the actor's left shoulder edge is bad, but it's a "hair" key; and the added hair on the actor's right is a bit harsh from the compression, you can see it more in the video), but it's not bad for a quick key given the source footage characteristics.

Of course proper lighting and recording is the most important, but other techniques you can try that may help are things such as pre screen smoothing, denoising (either pre or post key), levels /contrast adjustments, antialiasing fine hair areas (compression noise and mb edges will cause aliasing and a noisy alpha matte - you can see some of that in the video) . Pros/cons because "overdoing" post manipulations has problems too. Some of the techniques you might use also depend on the specific situation , and specific bg plate you were going to be using (for example you might want to leave some fg noise when compositing on a noisy bg plate), and you can "hide" certain issues from compositing techniques

Keylight can still produce good results, but it's going to be take more work finessing back and forth with multipass / multiple layers and keys, refine matte, etc..

preview, video attached below

[budwzr]

Try a soft matte with edge matte on top. IOW, two mattes.

Whoops, Post #2 already mentioned this.