Professional Editor Reviews - Artistic Effects (Blue Screen/Slow Motion)

Adobe Premiere Pro

Apple Final Cut Pro

AVID Xpress DV Pro

Pinnacle Liquid Edition Pro

Sony Vegas 6

Premiere Pro offers multiple keying controls, including Blue and Green screen keys, Chroma Key, Color Key and  four, eight and sixteen point garbage mattes. Chroma key is the most configurable, so we used that filter.

You select the background color with an eyedropper, then adjust similarity, blend, threshold and cutoff. Not sure what the last three do; simply wiggle them around until you find the best result. Don't forget to set the Smoothing control to high, this smoothes the edge between the foreground clip and background. 

If lighting or other conditions change in mid scene, you can adjust all parameters with key frames. Nice simple control set; almost prototypical, which makes them easy to learn.

Note that while previewing out the DV port to an NTSC monitor is convenient, sometimes the results on the monitor were overly optimistic. For example, though the edges of our second clip were clean on the TV, when rendered to MPEG-2, the green fringe was there, which cost us another render cycle. 

After Effects

Adobe After Effects Professional 6.5 ships with one of the most useful chromakey plug-ins available from Keylight. In many instances, simply selecting the color with the eyedropper seals the deal, but sometimes you do have to tinker.

Interestingly, AE didn't do as well with the dancing girl clip, and proved unable to completely remove the blue without showing some lettering through the girl. Edges were definitely smoother, and it could be with additional tinkering, we could remove this transparency issue (but controls are very dense - note opacity set to 100%, so that wasn't an issue).

On the Jan clip the results were simply awesome and one click simple, until we tested for darkening.

As with previous versions of the Keylight plug-in, the chroma key effect did tend to darken the background slightly, which we eliminated by boosting the Screen strength (similarity) just a notch. When using Keylight, always drag the chroma key clip to the side to make sure that there is no darkening.

Apple offers multiple options for compositing, including blue and green screen keying tools and generic color and chroma key filters.

Apple also offers a full range of ancillary filters, including spill suppression, 4 and 8 point garbage mattes, matte choker and Color Smoothing, which makes the background color more uniform and easier to exclude. Using a simple checkbox, you can activate and deactivate these controls, making it simple to test their effectiveness.

With the blue screen dancing girl clip, I started with the Blue screen preset. Controls here included color level, tolerance, edge thinning and edge feathering. Operation is aided by an innovative view that includes both original clips, the final overlay and a matte view.  This worked very well with the blue screen clip, producing a very clean key.  

The green screen preset proved less effective, so I switched to the chromakey filter. Numeric controls are complex, including chroma, saturation and luminance options for selecting your background color, edge thinning and softening controls and an enhancement control (which we avoided because it turned our edges purple). 

The recommended workflow seems to be to start in matte view and use gross control adjustments to find settings that produce a clean overlay. Then you can polish the overlay in either the final view or three view panel. 

The AVID chroma key control is a close to universal control with Chroma Key, Secondary Key, Spill Suppression, Scaling, Positioning and Cropping.

You can also invert the key and show the alpha channel which often help perfect the settings. Previewing in real time out the DV port also assisted our adjustments.

With most programs, you typically adjust one or two parameters to find the optimal setting. With Xpress, we pretty much fiddled with them all (Hue, Saturation, Luminance, Gain, Softness) as well as spill suppression to get it right.

Don't be afraid to delete the effect and start over if you're having problems getting a clean key. The controls are a touch unintuitive, but you can definitely get a good result if you keep working.

Liquid offers multiple keying options. Real time options include Blue Screen CPU, Chroma Key CPU, ChromaKeyer YUV CPU, and Green Screen CPU, while the "Classic" all in one editor must render before outputting.

In the past, the mediocre output quality of the real time keying filters forced us to use the Classic filters, which are very slow, to achieve competitive results. That may change this review.

Edition's engineers continue their favorite practice of assigning controls obscure names like Transition Shape and creating the most unintuitive screens possible for otherwise simple functions like chromakey (see below).

C'mon, fellas, give us an eyedropper and similarity key and make our life easier.

While you can't preview out the FireWire port when adjusting your filter settings, you can once you return to the timeline, which is almost as good.

After trying both the real time and classic editors, we decided to go with the real time, which were easier to use, obviously faster and for the first time, delivered near equivalent quality.

Sony has one chroma keyer filter with presets for Blue Screen, Green screen and several others. Controls are limited to Low threshold (luminance values), High threshold (luma value) and blur amount, but there's a mask only view that really helped nail our configurations.

You can preview out the FireWire port while you're perfecting your settings, which is helpful, though obviously, you can't see the edges, which is where Vegas had the most problems.

Still, with both clips, we produced good results that eliminated virtually the entire background without eroding the foreground image.

Real time playback was suboptimal. You can render the entire clip (which took 5:32 min:sec compared to under a minute for Premiere Pro ), but even then, playback on the NTSC monitor was broken up and distorted.

Not while setting the controls, but after you exit the filter interface and return to the timeline.

Profile - Premiere Pro is having a bad hair day/After Effects is much better, and looks the most natural

hand - lots of green in the hand and on left neck. Hint of transparency issue with hair.  After Effects has very clean key of hand, very smooth edges.

Profile - looks artificially smooth; lacks the detail seen in the After Effects hair and even Edition

hand - Slight hints of green, but nothing major. Hair again unnaturally smooth, some

Profile - Ragged on the hair

Hand - hand looks ragged and some artifacting in hair. 

Profile - Does an OK job here handling the hair.

Hand - Hair looks natural, maybe a hint of transparency.  Hand a touch aliased, but no green a t all.

Profile - hair looks a bit smoky

Hand - transparency issues with the hair; hand is very clean.

Jan - some fluttering and aliasing around the hair, some green, but OK./AE - good hair, looked great with sky background above cliff

Jan - very clean, good edges, low pulsing. Very realistic.

jan - Good clean key in the second video, though hair looked a bit ragged at times. No pulsing however, or transparency issues in any of the clips.

Jan - some fluttering and pulsing around the hair, some flashing of the entire frame

jan - good clean edges around the shirt in the second clip, with a bit of pulsing around the hair and the light background over the cliff.

3/4

5

4

3

4

2/5

4

2

4

3

3/5

4

3

4

3

3/4

4

3

3

3

3/5

4

3

2

3

14/23

21

15

16

16

Adobe Premiere Pro

Apple Final Cut Pro

AVID Xpress DV Pro

Pinnacle Liquid Edition Pro

Sony Vegas 6

Simple control that lets you set speed or duration. you can also specify to maintain audio pitch, but the audio starts sounding funky after dropping below 50% speed.

You can control the appearance of the slowed video with the Frame blend checkbox in the Field Options screen (right click on the timeline). 

If you check this box, Premiere blends the frames, which can increase ghosting, especially on scenes with fine detail (like the golf pitch video). 

Constant speed changes in Final Cut Pro are simple. You just right click, enter either a new duration or speed, and decide whether to use Frame Blending, which "smoothes the motion" or not.

You can set speed by duration in frames, frames per second, percentage speed change or Fit to Fill. When slowing motion, AVID offers four alternatives for creating slow motion frames.

• Duplicated Field - uses a single field to create the effect. For two-field media, this reduces the information stored by half because it drops one field of the image, resulting in a lower quality image. For single-field media, this is usually the best choice because of its speed (the other options do not improve effect quality for single-field media). 

• Both Fields - The Avid editing application uses both fields to create the effect. For example, the first two frames of a half-speed (50%) slow-motion effect repeat the original Frame 1 (both fields) twice. This option is good for shots without inter-field motion and still shots. With footage that includes inter-field motion, this method might result in minor shifting or bumping of the image because it disturbs the original order of fields: a Field 1 will appear both before and after the corresponding Field 2. Effects render relatively quickly. For best results, use evenly divisible frame rates with this option.

• Interpolated Field - The Avid editing application creates a second field for the effect by combining scan line pairs from the first field in the original media. This option calculates the motion effect at the field level rather than the frame level. Because the Avid editing application considers all fields and does not disturb the original order of fields, the smoothest effect results. This method is best for video-originated material or film-originated material transferred at 24 fps. Effects created using this option take the longest amount of time to render.

• VTR-Style - The Avid editing application creates a second field for the effect by shifting selected video fields of the original media by a full scan line. This technique is similar to that used by high-quality professional video decks when playing footage at less than normal speed. This option also creates the motion effect at the field level rather than the frame level; however, because pixels are not filtered, the final image is sharper than that created by the Interpolated Field option. The image might display some slight jitter at certain speeds. The time needed to render effects created with this option is longer than the time for effects created using either Duplicated Field or Both Fields but similar to the time needed for Interpolated Field.

Can perform both linear (one speed change) or dynamic (nonlinear speed change). Linear timewarp is simple control you can set with either duration or percentage.

What's relatively unique about the tool is the ability to set the method for adding additional frames. The different methods aren't that well described, but it's easy enough to experiment.

For example, when the motion involved an object like a golf club or baton, some slow motion techniques generated one or two "ghost" images, which was distracting. Experimenting with the various techniques, we eliminated this by using the Cut Fields technique (third shown below).

Progressive

Mix fields

Cut fields

Vegas offers two options for setting speed. You can designate the desired playback rate in the Properties window (accessed via right click).

Or, you can simply drag the clip to the desired length, with a handy duration screen shown above the timeline.

Either way, you can choose between two re-sampling methods, Force and Smart, or eschew re-sampling all together

With frame blend enabled, often saw two or three club shafts in the same frame, though shimmer was minimal.

Or, if you disable frame blend, it's frame duplication which looks choppy.

Not great.  Either significant shimmer (with frame blend enabled) or multiple clubs).

• Duplicated Field - No shimmer, looked like frame replication - only one in four frames moved.

• Both Fields - Minimal shimmer, but motion was jerky - only one in four frames moved.

• Interpolated Field - Lots of shimmer, but really, really smooth motion (every other frame moved).  Clear winnder for smoothness.

• VTR-Style - Lots of shimmer and shake, but no duplicated club (every other frame moved).

With frame smoothing enabled, frame quality was good, but accompanied by obvious shimmer.

Yes, with frame smoothing enabled.

No - can in After Effects, but interface was way too complex.

Dynamic speed changes, where you change the speed multiple times within a clip, is achingly, blindingly, you gotta be kidding me, do it in another program to save your sanity, complicated. No joke.

All other tools apply the dynamic speed change to the selected clip.  In FCP, if you change the speed of a single clip, it starts to effect all clips past or future on the timeline. Click play, and you could be watching a clip 20 seconds either way down the timeline.

Very challenging interface.

There are nine preconfigured gradual speed changes (timewarps) which were created in a higher end AVID system, but you can't change them. It's a good idea, but none of the configurations matched out test requirements.

Yes - However, finding the control is unnecessarily obtuse. You don’t right click and select dynamic time warp, as you do with the linear time warp control. Rather, first you select linear time warp, then you right click again and select “edit dynamic time warp.”

Once you find the dynamic time warp controls, you open the bottom half of the interface with a small, unobtrusive triangle located atop the control. Fortunately, once you find all the controls, and play with them for a bit, you’ll find the new feature quite capable, though we would have liked the same Bezier adjustments available on Edition’s real time effects. In addition, the control lacks preview capabilities, so you can’t check your work without exiting the effect control window, rendering the effect and then playing it back.

Yes - insert a Velocity Envelop

Then add points to the envelop line where you want to adjust speed ...

Then drag point down to desired speed.

Vegas doesn't automatically extend the clip on the timeline, so you'll have to drag the right edge further to the right to achieve the desired result.

This is the simplest, most elegant method we've seen for producing gradual speed changes. Simpler, is definitely better.

Adobe Premiere Pro

Apple Final Cut Pro

AVID Xpress DV Pro

Pinnacle Liquid Edition Pro

Sony Vegas 6

Very simple to move effects up and down and toggle their effect on and off. That makes it simple to apply multiple effects.

Just like Adobe, with all filters available pretty much all the time.  This makes it very simple to apply and adjust multiple effects.

You can nest multiple effects by adding another track on the timeline that you can later collapse (see timelines on the bottom). You edit each effect individually, however, clicking its track and opening the controls in the effects window (on top).

You can edit only one effect at a time, which you have to close before you can edit another. Very simple to toggle effects on and off, and to reorder them, which sometimes can make a big difference.

Vegas applies each effect in a chain. You can toggle and effect on and off quite easily, but you can only edit one effect at a time. Sony makes up for this by including a bunch of relevant controls in each effect (like brightness with color correction).