Chroma Key: Fusion vs. Premiere

I love Fusion and Resolve and I've been using them for about a year now. I'm trying to eliminate my dependence on Premiere and After Effects. I'm very close to achieving that goal, but the chroma key in Premiere seems to be so much easier to achieve high-quality results than the Delta Keyer and other chroma key tools in Fusion.

I understand Fusion offers endless flexibility, but I often have more than a dozen Fusion tools working in the Flow just to extract a clean image without jagged/jumpy edges. This often takes hours to experiment with various things until I finally have something relatively attractive, but it's still almost never as good as the results I get from Premiere. In fact, I can extract an image from a green screen and get smooth edges in just a few minutes in Premiere and the workflow is always intuitive and consistent, yielding consistent results every time.

Getting smooth edges from Fusion really does feel like black magic. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but do a lot of people really use Fusion for high-quality chroma keying or do they revert back to Premiere/After Effects when they need the best quality chroma key results?

Just to add another question, I would be curious as to what the preference would be, from someone who has used both Fusion's keyer and something like the RedGiant Keying Suite:

https://www.redgiant.com/products/keying-suite/


I'm getting ready to post a project that involved a bunch of green screen footage and I would love to know which would be the best tool for the job — Fusion, AE with Keying plugin, Other?

I rolled my own keyer because for several years there wasn't a reasonable keying solution in Fusion. It had previously relied on the availability of Keylight, but The Foundry pulled the OFX version when BMD acquired Fu. Delta's pretty good and fast, but it has the same problem as Keylight—the spill suppression method makes crunchy brown noise. So what I typically do is first try Primatte (only available in the standalone version of Fusion Studio). Sometimes the one-button auto procedure just works, and it's magic.

Usually it doesn't, though, so then I pull a fast key with Delta: Sample colors, adjust the clip values to get an acceptable edge, then feed the original image into a Matte Control, where I substitute the alpha from Delta, do the spill suppression, maybe do a small amount of matte blur and gamma adjustment, and post-multiply. This process usually takes me less than a minute (I've done it hundreds of times, so it's pretty much automatic for me). I Merge my FG and BG and evaluate the edge. If it looks good, then I'll move into the usual garbage and core masking, and maybe pull additional keys for areas where the main key doesn't work quite as well.

If it doesn't satisfy me, then I'll fall back to using my own keyer, which uses similar principles but sometimes gives slightly better or worse results.

Once the matte is satisfactory, regardless of which technique I use, I move on to color matching FG to BG, then tweak the edge gammas for a good blend, then light-wrap (if necessary) and edge blur. From there it's usually a matter of targeting problem areas for a little fine-tuning, then a regrain. All told, I usually budget two to four hours for a straightforward keying set-up, which means a decently-shot green screen, minimal blur, and no additional complications. Assuming there are multiple shots with the same set-up, I use the first one as a template, and the others usually take only twenty minutes to an hour. If there are different angles, then set-up of a new template based on the first might take an extra half-hour for the first one, again assuming no complications. These estimates are mostly based on doing driving composites. Talking head stuff can frequently be done much faster.

If you're interested in my home-made keyer, a tutorial on how to build it is available on my blog: http://www.bryanray.name/wordpress/blac ... on-macros/

I haven't made the macro itself available because the point of the article is to teach people how to make their own.

The point is that ultra key within in Pr is GPU accelerated and one can work in real time yet have better results than Rs 3d keyer.
In Resolve 3d keyer misses hair edges, and if one dips into Fusions delta or even Ultra incarnation, yes one gets better results BUT at a tremendous system load. Say goodbye to real time or even basic usability.
On a m1 mbp where I thought DR had the upper hand speed wise, I now realize that in real world scenarios PR is way faster with great keying results.

I'm not sure why you felt the need to resurrect a five year old thread to not contribute anything useful...

This is a forum where we express our opinion about issues we encounter… If you have a solution, tip or suggestion I am definitely looking forward to it.

Hey,

TLDR ? I totally agree with Bryan, since there are no more main information to know, especially in this x vs y field....

Now, since you felt like writing about chroma key anyway, what I can add to participate is I really don't know how one can even try to compare a NLE with node based compositing app....
Putting aside that there is absolutely no way at all you could fine tune a key project in Pr as you could in Fusion, I can make an effort and still play the game : I can understand your njoying the realtime playback you experience and everyone always prefers RT, but imho, as it looks like it's not always possible in Fusion, guess if a lot of users prefer quality and flexibility to realtime ?
Thus I think you should restrict your opinion to Pr and Resolve at least...