WOWWWWW
Not impressed sorry. That standard chromkeyer image is the worst possible example of a basic key.
Here is Blender’s very powerful keyer node, with ONLY the input color adjusted and using the low quality example frame.
Well, the Blender node is working well (far better than the standard, unoptimised chroma keyer); but I still think the CloudCutout is better in the images shown. The hair definition is finer and more pleasing to the eye.
That’s not to say that Blender cannot get better than shown, I’m pretty sure it can be. But I would prefer to see CloudCutout and Blender side-by-side in a few situations before writing it off.
You have to remember that the blend node was fed a low resolution example file - not the original high resolution file that CloudCutout used. That may account for most of the perceived difference.
To be honest I think I left despill turned on. That would have sucked the colour out of the hair. If I had spent just one second longer…
Yeah, I have to agree with 3pointEdit. That “Standard Chroma keyer” image they provide is totally bunk. It looks like either they didn’t know what they were doing or they intentionally did a bad job just to make their software look better. Plus, we’ve seen perfectly keyed hair since the 90’s. What we really need to see is how it handles green screens that aren’t perfectly lit. Graduations of green always make a compositer’s job more difficult.
I just have to tell this silly story if you don’t mind: I used to work at the tiny little shop in the early 2000’s. They had these two after effects guys just fresh out of art school. They used to complain all the time about having to pull keys and how hard it was if the green screen wasn’t perfectly lit (which it rarely ever was). Then one day we hired this guy to work on one of our commercials who had been working in the bay area on the Matrix. I watched him work a few times. He had some serious skillz. He used to use multiple keys and all these different filters and garbage mattes. He could pull the most prefect keys every time. Totally schooled the other two guys. That’s when I realized that a lot of keying had to do with your technical skill and your abilities as an artist and not the software.
After reading the article it really sounds like they have no idea that chroma keying exists. I mean, they are applying it to cutting out students from the backgrounds of their school photos. That’s a totally controlled environment. If you ask me it sounds like total overkill for something like that. I think they just want to take a thousand school photos and run them through the algorithm unattended and key them all automatically. I guess there’s a market for this or the service wouldn’t exist but it seems kind of silly. I think they kind of missed their mark.