Keying out the sky

Hi guys,

I'm getting sick of fiddling, so here's a question that hopefully you can help me with.

I have an outdoor tripod shot of a building that I took twice because of the blowing out problems. So one with the building properly exposed and one with the sky.

I thought I can just stack them on top of one another, add the color corrector 3way to the top one with the blown out sky, create a matte in CC and I would see the properly exposed sky from the clip underneath.

The matte looks perfect in CC preview mode, so I don't know why it isn't keying out. What am I missing?

Thanks,
Stefan

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macpro 2x3 ghz dual core intel, 10.6.8, FCS 2

You used secondary colour section to remove the sky on the top clip, yes? Are you viewing the result in the correct mode? It should really work.

Jude Cotter Wrote:
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> You used secondary colour section to remove the
> sky on the top clip, yes?

What I did is to click the eyedropper on the lower pane with the color/sat/luma bars and sample the sky. In matte view (click the key once) I made sure that I got the entire area by adjusting the sliders. Once that looked good I inverted the mask so the sky is now black instead of white (correct?) and clicked the key again to show 'final'. I deselected the color bar, as I think I should be fine with just masking by luma/saturation. At any rate, the matte view looks just fine.

Should I have clicked a 'match hue' in the upper panel instead? I just tried that and it didn't make a difference, although I didn't fiddle with it as long. I'm probably missing something conceptual here. If I didn't want to mask key out the sky but have it turn orange instead, I probably wouldn't need a second clip underneath. My composite mode is 'normal' as everything black will be transparent, right? Switching to 'Add' also doesn't change the result.

Thanks,
Stefan

--
macpro 2x3 ghz dual core intel, 10.6.8, FCS 2

Oh, doh, I just realised the problem - you're using the wrong filter. You need to use a Key to remove something, The CC secondaries just selects them for changes to hue and so on.

So put your good clip on V1, the blown out clip on V2. Add a Chroma Key (of your choice) to the top layer and click with the eyedropper to select the basic colour. The hold shift and use the eyedropper to select more of the sky if you need to. Hold Shift each time you want to add to the matte. You should see the bottom layer come though immediately, so maybe set up your key over a bright red colour matte if it's hard to see what you're doing.

Oh man, how many trees does it take to hide the forest? Just dragged the luma key on the clip on V2 - done. I keep talking about keying but then I don't use a key filter! (shaking head)

Thanks,
Stefan

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macpro 2x3 ghz dual core intel, 10.6.8, FCS 2

I was in the same place. I was thinking that what you were doing really should be working, and then it hit me lol