Keying

Those of you familiar with other versions of Primatte Keyer will find most of the familiar controls in the Keying section. As its name suggests, this is where all of the keying functions are located. The main difference will be the required use of a Filters window and a Canvas window. This is due to the internal architecture of Final Cut Pro.

Rather than work in the Canvas window or a full size composite as in After Effects or Motion, Final Cut Pro does not allow a plug-in to do arbitrary sampling in the main preview window. Instead, Primatte Keyer 4.0 for Final Cut Pro is built to have a custom sampling window in the Filters control window at the top. All of the other controls appear below the custom controls.

The main Sample and Viewer controls in the Primatte Keyer plug-in interface.

Interface

There are several sampling controls within each keying section.

Zoom Controls

The Zoom +/- buttons are at the top of the Filters window. '+' zooms in on the image and '-' zooms out. You can also fit the image to the sampling window or zoom to 1:1 view using the buttons at the top.

Pan (while zoomed)

While 'zoomed in' on the image in the Filters window, the user can pan around on the image by holding the 'Control' key down and click-dragging.

Foreground and Matte View

This allows the user to change the view in the Filters window...

Sampling Style

The Sampling Style area on the Filters window allows you to designate between Pixel and Rectangle sampling modes.

Auto Setup

The Auto Setup is a new feature in Primatte Keyer 4. It is an artificial intelligence algorithm that tries to figure out the backing screen color (blue or green), eliminate it and then tries to clean up any noise in the foreground object and the backing screen area. Ideally, the user should only have to do some spill removal as a last step in using Primatte. There are many things in a foreground clip that can interfere with getting a good result and if the initial result is not an almost clean key, then the user should perform a Reset and start the Primatte over using the standard four step operation (Set BG Color, Clean BG Area, Clean FG Area and Spill Minus).

Reset

The Reset button is used to reset all the Primatte parameters and start you back with a green or blue screen image.

Canvas Controls

This area on the interface allows the user to change the view in the Canvas window...