Primatte Keyer 4 for Apple Motion: Getting Started

Primatte Keyer 4 from Red Giant Software has a host of professional options for creating mattes from any object shot against a color background. In this section we will cover the Primatte Keyer for Motion interface, explaining the function of each button and menu item.

While Primatte Keyer is a chroma keyer, and thus can create a matte from any color background, for the purposes of this documentation the element to be keyed will be referred to as the “bluescreen” element.

Applying Primatte

Load a foreground and background clip into Motion.

Primatte Keyer is accessed like all filters from within Motion. Make sure that your foreground element is highlighted in the timeline. Primatte Keyer is accessed by selecting Primatte Keyer Pro from the Primatte Keyer sub-menu, located under Filters in the Library browser.

Primatte is applied to the foreground layer...

and the Primatte tools interface appears under the Filters tab in the Inspector.

Interface

All Primatte keying functions can be accessed through this interface.

There are four main components to the Primatte interface:

• Deartifacting

• Keying

• Alpha Controls

• Composite Controls

Interface and Sampling

Before we continue exploring Primatte’s features we need to go over the interface, and explain the proper way to sample pixels.

The Primatte Interface

Most of the tools in Primatte Keyer require you to sample areas of the foreground element and the color key area in the Canvas window using the arrow cursor.

Sampling Pixels

At this point it is important to provide a brief overview of how to sample pixels, because understanding the sampling process directly relates to Primatte features that will be explained and described in subsequent sections below.

What is sampling? The Primatte keying process requires you to designate areas of your bluescreen element as either foreground (fully opaque) or background (fully transparent). Primatte Keyer will then generate a matte (also commonly referred to as an alpha channel) based upon these selections. This process is known as Sampling.

Sampling involves selecting an area of the Canvas window with the mouse pointer. Click and drag the mouse to select a rectangular region. Primatte will average the pixels in the sampled rectangle derive a starting point from there. You can also just click on a single pixel.

Click and drag in the Canvas window to select a rectangular range of pixels. When you release the mouse button Primatte will generate a key based upon the average of the sampled pixels.