DV Matte Pro vs. Veescope

There is a demo of Veescope (made by the DVX DV people) on the current LAFCPUG newsletter. The link is:





Has anyone used this? I am wondering how it compares in quality to the highly recommended DV Matte Pro.

DV Matte Pro is $200

Veescope is $40.

I've been recommended DV MAtte Pro, but read no reviews of Veescope.

Thanks.

Harry.

Is it $40? Website says $100. Also looks like it hasn't been updated in a long time, unfortunately neither has DV Matte Pro. Still waiting for that killer app for FCP compositing.

-Noah

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It's version 1.14.

And it says $39, as far as I can tell. I think you are looking at a different App or Plug.

Harry

Noah must be looking at Veescope Live. We use it every month to tape lafcpug meetings. Brad is always at lafcpug each month showing off the app. its very cool. He's always tweeking it.

Michael Horton
-------------------

>Still waiting for that killer app for FCP compositing.

There you have it...
[www.thefoundry.co.uk]



www.strypesinpost.com

Thanks for the reply, Strypes.

Are you suggesting that Keylight is the one that you recommend?

And, if so, how is the learning curve compared to, say DV Matte Pro. Plese bear in mind that I lived through the 1960's and therefore have very few remaining brain cells.

Harry

It actually comes with After Effects...



www.strypesinpost.com

I have no intention of learning After Effects, thank you very much! I can barely remember my own name at this stage of life.

But the Keylight people have a version for Final Cut which I assume is pretty much the same pony as th After Effects version. I was hoping someone might tell me which is preferable technically: Keylight or DVMatte Pro - bearing in mind that I am an old hippie and slowing down at an alarming rate these days.

Best

Harry The Brainless One.

Keylight is also available in Shake 4.1, but if you're not up for AE, you may find Shake a bit tricky... and Shake is EOL...

Just download Veescope Key. It's free to try. See how it does for you. I see it each month at lafcpug and talk to Brad all the time. Its looks easy and it performs great.

Michael Horton
-------------------

Thanks to all for the input.

Best

Harry

You could try Veescope. I've only used the chroma keyer in FCP (which blows), and keylight in AE, but i don't do that much keying.



www.strypesinpost.com

My understanding is that it's really important to have "wraparound". DV Matte Pro has this feature - it helps the blend of foreground artist and plate very subtly.

I guess I'll check if Veescope has this.

Thanks for all the help.

Harry.

Quote

I have no intention of learning After Effects, thank you very much!

No offense, but pulling a good key is an art. That's why the people who run Flames and similar systems are called "artists." You're never going to find a one-button solution to pulling a good key. There are tons of plug-ins and other tools for pulling really crappy keys, but none of them is an acceptable substitute for learning how to pull a good key, then putting those techniques into practice.

A couple of days ago I was talking to an extremely accomplished visual effects artist. He's not a household name or anything like that, just a really talented guy with a great reputation in the field. We had some time to kill while I was helping him archive a job, and we chatted about the modular keyer in Flame. Flame's modular keyer, and particularly the 3D keyer within it, is pretty much the last great advancement in chromakey technology. You know what that guy told me? He said he never uses it. He described his approach to pulling keys, and how he builds up a tree of mattes pulled from different regions of the image and feeds them all into a single fill node. I've seen many of this guy's keys; they're nearly magical. And he pulls them fast.

My point here is that that friend of mine doesn't use any special tools. He just uses the basic keyer module in Flame ? which happens to be the tool at hand; it's not that different from Keylight or Primatte or any of the other keyers out there. But he knows how to use it, and gets amazing results.

"Is this cheap-ass, gimmicky keying plug-in better than that one" is the wrong question. "Does this basic set of techniques for pulling keys give me good results in a reasonable amount of time" is the right question.

Jeff,

You are probably well intentioned, however, you have taken my very simple question, turned it into a podium for yourself to give an unrequested lecture and finally twisted my original question into a phrase which makes me sound like a moron.

You literally rephrase my question thus: "Is this cheap-ass, gimmicky keying plug-in better than that one".

And that isn't what I asked at all.

I wanted a simple opinion as to whether one piece of software was technically better and easier to learn than another piece of software.

Your reply starts: "No offense", so you obviously know that what follows will likely cause offense.

You've slapped me down before, Jeff, - about a month ago - and I don't like it this time any more than I did then.

You are probably a really nice guy, but I must ask you please not to talk down to me.

Thank you.

Harry.

Harry, I don't think that's Jeff's intention at all.

Jeff was a Flame guy, and not long ago, editors were not expected to pull keys (which still belong to the realm of the graphics artist, IMO). I almost always work with a graphics guy, mainly because it requires two dramatically different areas of expertise.

One of my friends who's a graphics guy, was telling me that with Keylight, it makes things look so simple that now you get a lot of young upstarts who go "I can pull a key". Which makes sense, because with Keylight, you can do things like control the spill, etc.. But the truth is that keying isn't just about applying that 1 filter/effect. To pull a good key, you have to create a node tree where you isolate parts of the image, key them and choke each matte differently, and finally combine everything at the bottom of the tree. It is relatively complex operation, and frankly, I don't even see many guys doing it that way. I'm not sure about simple, because simple and good sometimes don't go together, and Jeff's point is that it isn't just about the tool, but there's a specific skill involved as well. I guess you could bottle it down in a way to the Avid vs FCP question. Which is better? But the bottom line is that it doesn't mean you can tell a better story with one but not the other, nor does it imply that the quality of storytelling has improved dramatically in the last 10 years in a way that didn't happen 25 years ago due to the recent influx and development of NLEs. Right down to it, editing is still a skill, and you don't pick between an FCP/Avid or Premiere workstation, but you pick an editor who can tell a good story and deliver it.



www.strypesinpost.com

OK.

I withdraw my comment and apologize to Jeff for getting unduly bent out of shape!

Harry.

Having been away from email all day, this is the first opportunity I've had to read this thread and respond.

Harry, the reason I prefaced my remarks with "no offense" was because I was operating under the assumption that those who read them would say "Oh, he means no offense, even though he typed this up fast and was kind of terse and snotty."

Strypes got my point just right: The keyer matters not a bit compared to the skill of the person pulling the key. The reason I told that anecdote was to illustrate that a talented guy who has the (arguably) most advanced keyer available on the commercial market chooses not to use it, relying instead on a basic, no-frills tool, and he pulls great keys. It's not about the tool, but about knowing how to do the job.

Sure, I freely admit that maybe I was more snotty than I meant to be. But in my defense, your question really did boil down to "which keyer is better." Maybe that's not what you meant to ask, but that's what I read, so if I jumped to an incorrect conclusion about your intent, I apologize.

I guess what I really should have said was that while some keyers are preferred by different people for different reasons, the cheapo little pieces of junk that are advertised with copy like "turn any Mac into a real-time keyer!" are generally useless for anybody who gives a damn about their work. The underlying assumption that seems to drive this most recent wave of junk keyers appears to be, "Keying is a technical problem, and it can be solved with the right technology." That's bull. It's not a technical problem, but an artistic one, and the best keyer is the one the artist prefers.

In other words, rather than comparing keyers based on some imaginary technical merits, instead begin by learning to key ? not saying you haven't; just saying that's the starting point ? and then trying the various tools to see which works best for you.

I was trying to do the "unask the question, fellow seeker of truth" thing, and instead it came out as "you're not cool like me, ha ha," and for that I sincerely apologize.

Jeff,

Erm ... well, that was the question I was in fact asking: "which keyer is better."?

Keylight or DVMattePro?

And, since you know these programs like the back of your hand, I'd truly like to have your opinion.

I am, of course, aware that a program does not make a good key on its own and that a human being of at least moderate artistry is required to give it a push in the right direction, per your comments above.

Back in the dark ages, when I lived in London, I did things that we used to call, rather quaintly, "traveling mattes". I never saw a green screen, but did plenty of blue screen and also an appallingly complicated process which depended on sodium vapor lighting and an old technicolor 3 strip camera with beam splitters which produced "in camera" traveling mattes on high contrast black and white film.

If you've seen any movies made at Pinewood, Elstree or Shepperton Studios from the 1970s and 80s you may have seen my work which is largely characterized by actors surrounded by a brightly glowing thick yellow line.

They are usually pointing off screen and shouting: "Watch out! here they come again!"

That's how it used to be.

But now we have all these groovy new tools which enable us to see the results of our work "live" in real time, and without waiting for the overnight bath at the lab, going through the optical processes and finally massaging the end result to more or less fit. It was a question of physically realigning the projector side of an optical printer by microns - and often having to combine several passes to produce what we thought at the time were pretty good composites.

Of course, now the work we did looks laughable.

So, bearing that in mind, and also bearing in mind that I would like to learn how to apply my analog experiences of yore to the modern era, maybe you have an opinion about what might be a starting point for me vis a vis software.

Ahhh! How I miss the odor of stale stop bath and returning home at night smelling like a dead circus chimp.

Please advise.

Best,

Harry.

Harry Bromley-Davenport.

PS.

Jeff,

By the way, it was considered sissy, unmanly and fussy to columnate this ghastly 3 strip contraption with its hellish beam splitter.

So two union grips (or more) would lurch on set heaving this massive camera rig and crash it down on it's support system thereby knocking everything out of whack. And they never gave us the good lenses either. That was reserved for principal photography.

H.

Harry Bromley-Davenport.