I am pulling good keys on the timeline with 411 colorspace material. I never thought I would see the day.

Spectramatte is good. No more going outside the Avid to comp every chromakey shot!

Just wanted to share the joy that no doubt many of you already knew.

Yeah, supposedly it works in 10 bit. It is definitely an upgrade from the old keyers. Good enough for everyday use.

10bit?  Where did you hear that?  It would explain why you can't upgrade it to HQ.

It is a great keyer, but as has been previously mentioned a number of times on feature requests needs 2 things:

-  Garbage Matte capabilities

-  Ability to 'choke' your matte

Then it would be awesome!

SpectraMatte
Create a high-quality key, even with compressed HD codec material. Eliminate guesswork and get the perfect key using the interactive interface. Preview your keys in real time and with online quality with 16-bit SpectraGraph technology.

From Avid.

With 10 bit mode on, that should give you 10 bit mode out of SDI.

But yeah I agree with garbage mattes and choker. But I guess that is what Ultimatte and others are for. I don't think Avid is trying to compete with these more specialized plugins. I think they where just trying to improve the archaic keyer from Meridien.

Cool, thanks for the info.

Yeah, I see your point, it's just another of those things that you think, if Avid just added these little features it would be amazing and you wouldn't need a 3rd party plugin.

Seriously, 'choking' a matte in a keyer (without blurring) is hardly revolutionary - you can even do it in the RGB keyer.  And you'd hope they could transfer the Paint Effect parameters over, so you could make quick Garbage mattes.

Also, the ability in 'Invert' your selection; or select a Key colour and Keep colour.

Still, it's the SpectraGraph for getting rid of Spill is worth it alone.

 Absolutely agree...used it yesterday on a job that had to be in and out the door the same day, and it pulled a very good key in no time. Very little tweaking required. In the bad old days I used to send this stuff out to AE first...

 I found playing with the luma curve acts like a choker..... Garbage mattes would be cool, but you could also use the animatte and then apply the spectramatte to that.

Mark

 I've actually been able to pull better keys with Spectramatte than Ultimatte on some occasions. And Ultimatte won't let you reposition the subject in it's interface.

Diddos on the garbage matte/choke

I find that the spill supression isn't that great. I honestly still get better results of BCC Chroma Key, in addition I can easily add more BCC effects on it like matte clean-up, light warp, etc. Those won't work with Specramette keying.

I've always found the Spill Correction great, but as I've never used BCCs, I can't comment.

To be honest, I actually don't know how to 'stack' the effects to use BCC Matte Cleanup or Choker etc...

I've tried all the obvious ways (ALT drop etc...) but can't get it to work.  And the usual Boris patchy Online Help is no help at all.

How would you apply say a Chroma key then Cleanup?

The way to stack BBC effects is to go into the "title/matte" properties in the effect editor and select "multi-filter start" if it's the first effects in a stack, "multi-filter mid" if in between and "multi-filter end" if it's the last effect. Alt dragging them will nest them properly.

I worked on a key today and this is the order I did;

1 - Avid Colour Correction

2 - BCC Pixel Chooser (for a garbage matte)

3 - BCC Chroma Key

4 - BCC Matte Choker

5 - BCC Light Wrap

I've attached a sample of the effect editor.

Ra-ey Saleh:

And the usual Boris patchy Online Help is no help at all.

Hard to beat Scott's example though.

Here's a frame for the jey I did today. yes, that is my messy living room, yes that is my pregnant wife :) It's for a marketing video for my company, we shot it at 1AM :)

Scott Carnegie:

yes that is my pregnant wife

Thanks! She was a little worried about being in my company marketing video appearing pregnant, but if anything someone seeing it might be more likely to remember me. She's not so big that she's drawing attention to it at this point. Due in Dec