Ultra Fast Keying in Premiere Pro

maltaannon.com by Jerzy Drozada Jr

Lately I had to do a lot of keying work for a short series of tutorials I was doing. Actually – I’m working on it as I write this, but I just did something quite amazing, so I wanted to share it with you. And I’ve got to tell you this – Ultra Key alone didn’t do it, so read on.

I’m editing a DSLR green screen footage in Premiere Pro CS5, and once everything is in place, I use Dynamic Link to key out the footage. Why not use Ultra Key? Well… Ultra Key is fantastic, fast, and GPU accelerated, however the footage needs to be close to perfect in order for it to work – which is not the case here. I had a lot of wrinkles, bad lighting that I couldn’t make any better due to space limitations in the room I was shooting in, and, as I mentioned before, I used a DSLR to record the footage so I had no control over the compression settings. All of this caused the footage to be a wee bit too difficult for Ultra Key to pull a decent key. Not to mention garbage mattes and adding Lightwrap to create the final look.

I’ve set up a nice workflow using Dynamic Link and a keying template I made for the project for quickly and efficiently replacing source footage to be keyed out, so now everything works smoothly, however it takes some time to render. I should mention this is 1080p @ 23,976fps. Eventhough the workflow is flawless, the footage was very demanding and required adjustments on every shot, digging through precomps, resampling colors, and doing a long RAM Preview to make sure nothing was missed. read more...