Keying

Those of you familiar with previous 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.

Interface

The Keying interface is divided into a number of component groups. In this section we will cover the Basic Control options where you select the sampling and view modes that are shown in the Composer window.

• Deartifacting

• Basic Selection

There are multiple sampling controls within each section of the Primatte Keyer Pro interface.

Auto Compute

The Auto Compute is a new feature in Primatte Keyer Pro 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. Just click the Auto Compute button once to activate the analysis. The process usually only takes a second or two. Once complete, you should look at the resulting matte using the View menu (above Auto Compute) to check the results.

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 (Select BG, Clean BG, Clean FG and Spill -).

Basic Controls

Not every key will work with Auto Compute because of noise, color correction that skews the backing color, or foreground subjects that have lots of spill or colors that are close to the background screen color. In these cases you will need to sample in the Composer window and use the Select menu to change modes.

These modes are used to choose the background color (Select BG Color), Clean the foreground and background areas (Clean FG Noise, Clean BG Noise) and clean up spill, and transparency. You simply choose a mode from the menu and then click and drag in the composer window to sample. Please see the Primatte Keyer tutorial for a step-by-step instruction on the order to sample

Median Sampling Option

The Median Sampling Option is the same as Point selection except that each point is the result of taking a 3x3 region around the point the user clicked and then applying a median filter. This can potentially reduce any noisy pixels.