Chroma Keying Using a Beige Wall for a Background?

I have a bunch of footage of people being interviewed against a beige wall background. I've never chroma keyed before, so this is a majorly novice question. But is it possible to chroma key against a plain wall background?

iMac G5 (PPC), Mac OS X (10.4.9), 20 inch, 2.1ghz, 1.5 RAM, 250gb HDD

Posted on Dec 15, 2007 7:30 AM

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2 replies

Dec 15, 2007 7:44 AM in response to Michael Clark12

Almost anything is possible. But what color are the people in front of the wall? Close to beige?

The reason we go with blue or green is a few fold... primary chroma... and is often a shockingly different background than foreground.

I've done my own keys using difference mattes with beige walls... usually for effects and not anything where the keying had to be perfect.

CaptM

Dec 15, 2007 8:26 AM in response to Michael Clark12

No.
Well, as the Major says, it CAN be done but the effort to key out beige is wasted.
Either reshoot or come up with a better way to fill the background.

Hint: There is no better way to fill the background and make it look like it was keyed. You can rotoscope the people with masks but that's even harder than trying to pull a decent key from the beige.

Okay, look, there are some workarounds. You can make a copy of one clip and use all kinds of filters on it to make the beige pixels key out without doing too much damage to the beige-hued pixels in the flesh of your interview subjects. You may stack three or four copies of the same clip using different matte edge, mask, and selection filters on each. Then you export with alpha channel and re-import and use this copy as a travel matte to punch holes in your underlying copy of the same interview. And if you shot on a format like DV or less, the whole effort is wasted since DV creates such terrible edging, unless, of course, you know even more tricks.

bogiesan

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Chroma Keying Using a Beige Wall for a Background?

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