Final Cut Express; native
- black edges on the matte
- upper section of rope is just gone
- less detail around edges of hair
- more jagged edge on back of t-shirt
- required understanding of many settings
Oak Street Software's VKey
- softer, less obvious edges
- rope is not entirely keyed out
- preserved more edge detail
- smoother on long edges
- used default settings; some subtle adjustment might have made it even better
To be entirely fair, there are many settings in the FCE chroma-keyer that make it a more versatile keyer. Also, this particular shot poses some real challenges to any keyer. It's hard to find dark edges on a shadowy background, and the dark shadows on the subject can sometimes fool the keyer. The low color resolution of DV makes the rope a tricky proposition, altogether. However, the VKey filter made the best of a bad situation, with little or no effort on my part. I'm confident that it will give you a better key than most chroma-keyers that sell for ten times the price of our VKey filter.
The lastest version of VKey is about twice as fast as the earlier, unoptimized version. Therefore, we are proud to add that the VKey keyer may even offer a performance advantage over the native Final Cut filters. The VKey filter runs fastest when used directly in Quicktime. Because it is a Quicktime filter, running under Final Cut doesn't offer optimal performance, compared to running in Quicktime. The keyer will almost run in real time (on a G5 2Ghz) under Quicktime Player. It takes about 5 minutes to key 2 minutes of DV on the same machine in FCE. Your results may vary.