What is the correct workflow for this?

I'm making a training video that is a PPT slide deck that has me as the "talking head" overtop of the slides. I'm shooting myself against a green-screen, and it's a long format thing so I end up with several files of myself, which then after editing turn into 100's of clips of green screen footage.

I really want to use the Delta Keyer in Fusion for the key because A) it works and B) it's GPU accelerated.

My issue is that I don't want to have to manually take each greenscreen clip into Fusion and add the keyer. It takes forever. However, I've tried both making all of the GS clips one Fusion clip, and also grouping the GS footage as a compound clip - and then applying the Delta Keyer to the result. This isn't working because:
- The transitions I have between different GS clips are hosing up the key. When I put the key on each clip it happens before the transition. When I group into a compound or Fusion clip - the transitions get applied first and the keyer doesn't work on the transition frames worth a damn.
- I need to be able to move myself around on the screen. Sometimes bottom right, sometimes bottom left. If I do this at the GS clip level - again it screws up the key. I have to go through and slice up teh compound or Fusion clip on the timeline to apply resize/move - meaning I now have to manually create a set of cuts that I already had between the original clips.

The only workable solution I've come up with is to key and render with an alpha channel all of the green screen footage before I do any editing. This isn't horrible, except I'm burning a lot of render time keying footage that I know is useless.

Keying on the color page seems to work OK. I can group the GS clips and that grouping doesn't exist so far as the edit page knows. Color page work also seems to be applied before transitions. It's just not as good of a key and it's a lot slower to render.

Ideas? I'm sure that it's just my own inexperience making this harder than it needs to be.
Tnx - Matt

I'm sure that it's just my own inexperience making this harder than it needs to be.

Actually, it may be your camera doing that.

I'm partial to using cameras that will not split long takes into multiple files for just this reason.

Blackmagic's own cameras record one file per clip. Panasonic's GH5 does as well. Other's might also. So if long takes are something you do often, planning for a new camera should be at the top of your To Do list.

For the current media, one idea is add all the shorter clips to a timeline and export out one long take to make the work easier. DNxHR 444 12 bit should make sure enough of the original information is preserved for Green Screen to work well.

That's kinda where I ended up. Even if I have just one file from camera (which is never going to happen. I'm recording over many days, or sometimes weeks) it still leaves me with either:
-Key a giant file (most of which is garbage) and render to an intermediate file. Or
-Create clips and deal with color page keying, or lots of trips to the Fusion page to do the same thing over and over

Neither of these are really good options though, so I thought I'd ask.

Thanks Jim.

I think keying in Color is your answer.

First, you can use a Remote Grade to apply the same Color effect to every clip from the same original media. So if you have one clip that you've edited into 100 pieces, your Color key instantly applies to all 100 pieces. (As long as clips point back to the same original file, they are all covered by the same Remote Grade. If you do media management to externally break your long clip into only its sub-clips, that will break things.)

So for one media file, it's one Color node -- if you can pull a reasonable key in one node, but of course you can use tracking, power windows, combine multiple alphas, etc, in Color. Even if you use several Color nodes, though, it's a matter of copy/paste once for each media file. So if you have 10 media files of you talking, you'd key once and then paste that (as a starting point, if the exposures are different) 9 times.

Second, I think Color stuff is GPU accelerated -- it certainly is more performant than Fusion Keys.

Third, I imagine you're a small talking head compared to the rest of the video, so you may not need the sophisticated keying you can do in Fusion. This doesn't sound like a VFX-level of compositing here.

So you'd want to look up Remote Grade and also how to add an alpha output to a node so you output an alpha channel back to Edit. Then position/size you as necessary in Edit/Cut (Which is going to be easier than if you decided to do compositing/transforming in Fusion.)

lots of trips to the Fusion page to do the same thing over and over

viewtopic.php?f=36&t=132064

I think keying in Color is your answer.

All good points, but I'm going to stick with keying -> rendering for now and here's my rationale:
-Remote grades are one of the worst parts of Resolve. That you have to chose between using remote or local and deal with copying back and forth is absurd. Master clip effects in Premiere work far FAR better than remote grades in Resolve. I've ranted about this since V14, but oh well. As a bit of a tangent I don't think that anyone has really solved this "I have a basic grade I want to apply to everything that comes out of camera X" problem if that grade isn't a LUT...

-Keying in the color page is just simply not as good as keying in Fusion. The Delta keyer in Fusion just works. Keying in the color page is fussy and not nearly as forgiving if you lighting isn't exactly the same day in and day out. The render times for the delta keyer are better on my system too (RTX2080, but slower Xeon CPUs)

- The processing time to do the key is a "once and done". I drag all my files onto one outrageous timeline, key them (using some of the advice on how to automate tasks in Fusion pointed to by another poster) and render over night. I then don't have to deal with the performance hit of keying while doing my edits.

Really do appreciate you taking the time to chime in though. Always something to learn from those who do this more often than I do!

I think keying in Color is your answer.

All good points, but I'm going to stick with keying -> rendering for now and here's my rationale:
-Remote grades are one of the worst parts of Resolve. That you have to chose between using remote or local and deal with copying back and forth is absurd. Master clip effects in Premiere work far FAR better than remote grades in Resolve. I've ranted about this since V14, but oh well. As a bit of a tangent I don't think that anyone has really solved this "I have a basic grade I want to apply to everything that comes out of camera X" problem if that grade isn't a LUT...

Well, that was just one suggestion. Another, more straightforward solution might be to select a clip from one camera/angle in Color's Clip track, then use the Clip dropdown at the top of the screen and select Common Media Pool Source. Then you can select all of the resulting clips and put them into a Group. Repeat for each camera/angle/taping that you feel you should distinguish. Then you can use the Group Pre-clip set of nodes do you everything-for-this-camera-and-angle work, and then work individually on clips, right? And Groups are project-wide, so your work would apply across multiple timelines as well.

Color has an amazing depth -- which reflects the fact that it was a standalone app and not a ridiculous Photoshop-ified program with layers and effects on layers, along with all of the crazy workarounds and mental-warping necessary to operate in that kind of world. "Adobe After Effects: Same workflow as Premiere, only slower!" and "Premiere: Photoshop for moving pictures!" (Sorry, that's my rant.)

-Keying in the color page is just simply not as good as keying in Fusion. The Delta keyer in Fusion just works. Keying in the color page is fussy and not nearly as forgiving if you lighting isn't exactly the same day in and day out. The render times for the delta keyer are better on my system too (RTX2080, but slower Xeon CPUs)

Color is probably not as good in many ways. But I have to disagree on "Delta Keyer just works". If it just works, then Color or the Color-based Edit keyer just work too, because the key is simple and your requirements aren't very high. For everything else you're going to use multiple Delta Keyers, Color Corrections, Matte Control, etc. So "just works" is glossing over a lot of work -- often work specific to a particular shot and not shareable across shots even from the same angle and camera.

I was shocked when I first saw someone pull a key in Color. I always thought of keying as a compositing function -- or a cheap, placeholder function in an editing timeline -- and immediately thought of Delta Keyer, which to your point is impressive. But Color not only has a nice set of tools like the 3D selector (which is the basis for Edit's new Color Keyer) and things like Color Compressor, Color Stabilizer, and exceptionally powerful (yet easy) masking and tracking.

- The processing time to do the key is a "once and done". I drag all my files onto one outrageous timeline, key them (using some of the advice on how to automate tasks in Fusion pointed to by another poster) and render over night. I then don't have to deal with the performance hit of keying while doing my edits.

True. Though Color's pretty performant and caching, render-in-place, etc might close the gap depending on how large your program is and how much work you intend to do after keying.

Really do appreciate you taking the time to chime in though. Always something to learn from those who do this more often than I do!

Just thinking out loud, in case I ever have to do something similar.

Have you tried using an Adjustment Clip for the keying?

For some reason the alpha from fusion nodes on adjustment clip doesn't punch through in edit.

@Matt Heere: would setting up delta keyer on one clip, opening the clips tab and applying the compositon to all other clips via middle-button click on that clip solve your problem?

@Matt Heere: would setting up delta keyer on one clip, opening the clips tab and applying the compositon to all other clips via middle-button click on that clip solve your problem?

Maybe. It's still quite a bit of manual work and it's easy to miss a clip when doing that sort of operation one at a time. You have to picture that I have hours and hours of footage. The end product here is on-line learning courses, some of which are 40-50 hours total when complete - so you can imagine how many hours of raw footage that starts out as. I got over 100 *files* (not clips) from the last instructor and that was only 2 per day (one for the AM and one for the afternoon - he spent 50+ days working on the course). By the time it's all cut up to get the final edit it could be well over 1000 individual clips.