Friday, June 7, 2013

NUK222 keying exercise

fxPHD April term courses are running nicely. I tested some different approaches in keying scanned film footage from NUK222 class and got pretty decent results. Main problems were edge boiling due to film grain and restoring hair detail but with some fiddling I got an ok result for hair and pretty nice edge for dark jacket.

This is the original and my result on neutral background (click for pixel-per-pixel zoom):

Node graph:


I tried to keep node graph organized and tidy. Key section pulls the main key with two Keylight nodes and inputs from different denoising. Hair matte manipulation is for main hair detail from keyers and blurs and erodes the edge for blending with hair element from hair detail section. Hair detail generates non-alpha hair that is comped onto background under fg. Jacket patch is for removing boiling on the dark jacket edge. It could be made simpler by patching the key instead, at the moment it generates a jacket-colored patch that is comped under fg to fill edge holes.