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Pulling keys is usually a royal pain, especially if you're working with footage that someone else shot. The lighting isn't right, the key isn't simple, garbage mattes have to be keyframed, and spill filters have to be tweaked. It was a lot of work- until now.
I'm writing this after having just run a new keyer plug-in through its paces. It's Phyx Keyer, developed by PHYX, Inc., and it runs on the FxFactory plug-in engine. It can function as a plug-in to Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP), and Apple Motion. When installed via the FxFactory application, the Phyx Keyer package includes five plug-ins: Keyer, Lightwrap, DiffKeyer, Screencorrector, and Despill (Figure 1). All the plug-ins have a Help button that will launch your web browser into the appropriate Phyxware.com page.
This is the first thing I was impressed with: having Help actually built into the plug-in itself. I wish all plug-in developers did this. Being able to save my settings as presets in each of these plug-ins could make postproduction on larger projects much easier too. Because the presets are independent documents, saved to any location I want, I can move and share them between edit bays- another feature I wish more filters adopted.
I tested these plug-ins in both Final Cut Pro 7.0.2 and Motion 4.0.2 using Snow Leopard 10.6.4 on a Mac Pro running an ATI Radeon 4870 graphics card with 16GB RAM. I was also viewing my output through an AJA Kona LHi card, on an FSI LM-2450W production monitor. I wanted to be able to see as clearly as I could how clean or dirty this key er would be.
KEYER FILTER
I'll run through these filters in the order I used them. Naturally, I started with Keyer. The first thing I noticed was the lack of controls. I was taken aback at first, but once I started to tweak the key, I...