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Advanced Spill Suppression Methods

Advanced Spill Suppression Methods

on Feb 5th 2013 with 12 comments
Tutorial Details

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

Download Source Files

This tutorial shows how to use sophisticated channel operations to achieve a more accurate spill suppression result than is attainable with AE’s default plug-ins.

Part 1

Download Tutorial .mp4

File size: 104 MB

Part 2

Download Tutorial .mp4

File size: 105.2 MB

 
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Daniel Broadway is a professional graphic designer working at an NBC affiliate as Graphics Director. He is also a freelance visual effects artist and compositor, having worked as visual effects supervisor on two independent feature films "20 Years After.", and most recently "A Lonely Place for Dying."  

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  • Alessandro

    Nice Work Daniel!

  • joel

    very impressive methods. Thank you

  • Jean-Francois Massé

    Too bad the CineGobs plugin is not compatible with CS6 for Mac… But that’s interesting stuff.

    • http://www.facebook.com/dbroadway Daniel Broadway

      Ah, I’m on a PC, so I didn’t know CineGobs didn’t work on a Mac. Still, you could pre-comp the method I showed with the channel mixer, and then use your matte from Keylight to key out the spill suppressed version.

  • Spencer Tweed

    Freakin awesome! This holds the key to my, um, keying! I’ve always struggled with keying in AE and it tends to boil down to the spill, and now I finally have a powerful tool to handle this. The light-wrap technique you touched on at the end is genius! With keylight you can choose a color to replace the spill with, but unfortunately if your background is varied you are totally screwed. With this I could just blur my background and sandwich it in there!!

    - Spencer

    • http://www.facebook.com/dbroadway Daniel Broadway

      Yeah, I love replacing my spill with a blurred BG plate, it makes the element sit into the shot very nicely. :)

      • Spencer Tweed

        Exactly! I’ve always wondered why Keylight didn’t let you select a layer instead of just one color…

        - Spencer

  • http://www.facebook.com/Patrick2by4 Patrick Miao

    Are you using 4:2:0 footage or 4:2:2 footage? Maybe I am doing it wrong
    but I am not getting good results with this method. The edges on stringy
    hair seems to fade in and out.

    • http://www.facebook.com/dbroadway Daniel Broadway

      This is RED footage, so basically it’s 4:4:4. Can you post a frame of your problem?

  • http://twitter.com/TheFaldor Martin Lejeune

    Oh hey PixelMagic, loved your Star Trek trailer btw

    • http://www.facebook.com/dbroadway Daniel Broadway

      Thanks!

  • JustAThott

    Thanks for the helpful tutorial!

    A couple of helpful additions:

    On the Mac, you can get as good or better results using Spill Killer from Red Giant. They offer it in 8-bit in the Composite Wizard package, and in higher bit-depth (and 64-bit memory for AE6) in the Key Correct package.

    Both packages are the same; KC is the updated version of CW. The packages contain all kinds of great greenscreen plugins to repair mattes, etc.

    Spill killer lets you dial in the percentage of spill attentuation in a much more specific way. I found when I used it on the example image, I was able to get the green cast off her face as well, and improve her skin tone.

    If you want a free plug-in, you can build this kind of spill suppression using PixelConduit. It’s a free, node-based compositing engine that can operate inside of AE, Motion, FCP, etc. You need to learn how to drive it, but then it’s easy to build a node tree (like in Nuke) that performs the operations of the spill killer.

    Hope that helps.