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Posted by David McCall on 01/20/06 15:28
Your handle may be "nobody special", but I think you have been really
special for this poster. You have given him a lot of excellent clues, and
I think many of us that have been around as long as you have may have
appreciated the refresher as well. Thanks.
Just to add a couple bits of trivia. The orange they used for matteing
in film was the light from sodium vapor lights, much like what you often
see in parking lots today. The trick was that those lights put out an
extremely narrow spike of orange that could be filtered out in the lab
to pull a matte. Of course the down side is that it is pretty close to skin
and popular costume colors making it a bit tricky.
Studio cameras all used to put out a clean Red Blue and Green
signal right off the preamps of the tubes that pick up those colors.
Blue and Green are right there perfectly clean. It made creating a
chroma keyer relatively simple. Red is of limited value because it
is so involved in skin color. of course there was no spill suppression
or other features we count on today. All you could do was cut a hard
edged hole that you could use as a matte.
Ultimatte changed the world of keying by creating very fancy boxes
that had spill suppression and the ability to extract natural looking
shadows,
soon they could even deal with frizzy hair, smoke, glasses, and other stuff
we used to have to avoid. They single handedly revolutionized keying
for video. It still wasn't easy, but at least now it was possible to make a
natural looking color key. Of course now all of the software keyers have
these features. Unfortunately, DV has thrown a wrench into the works.
The heavy compression now makes keying a bit harder. Some software
claims to have overcome this issue, but I have not tried it.
Another bit of trivia is that Chromakey is actually the registered name
used by Grass Valley for their keying system (one of the first keyers
that actually worked well). I believe the proper generic term is color key.
David
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