Physical Factors Affecting the Key

To achieve the best possible result with a keyer, users must take into account various factors which are originated from the physical characteristics of the greenscreen keying pipeline itself. Apart from the Reality Keyer’s adjustments, your virtual production’s quality depends on several factors such as your camera settings and preferences, how you configure the studio lighting, etc. Although your production pipeline may require a different setup, here are the general suggestions for achieving the best result with the Reality Keyer:

Camera Settings Suggestions

• Keep the camera iris in manual mode for consistency of the light received by the lens.

• Do not overexpose your cyclorama not to lose the saturation.

• Deactivate the "Details" settings of your camera. To set an example, turning off the camera sharpening filters and capturing non-filtered images raw images creates better result in the Reality Keyer. If you still need sharpness in your final image, you can apply sharpening filter using Sharpen node.

• Choose Level A for your 3G setup.

• Activate CLASS (Chromatic Aberration and Sharpness Solution) if your camera supports such a feature to compensate for chromatic lens aberration.

Cyclorama

Although the wing numbers and cyclorama’s size can be different depending on your requirements, the following general suggestions may affect the quality in a better way:

• Keeping the cyclorama’s width more significant than its depth and height might help eliminate the light bounces on your cyclorama from outside light sources, which can cause unwanted spills.

• Keeping the red and the blue channel values of the color of cyclorama nearby zero would bear better results.

• Having rounded corners instead of sharp edges smooths the lighting in your cyclorama and this affets your keying in a positive way.

• Using professional chroma key paint produce better result.

• Using paint specially crafted for keying process professional produce better result.

• Evenly painted cyclorama produce better result.

Lighting

Lighting is a crucial part of keying in production pipeline. Attributes of your light, such as brightness, placement of lights, and color temperture affects the quality of keying.

• Considering illuminating the floor, talent, and wings of cyclorama as different lighting levels and adjusting lighting setup depending on this approach helps to achieve better results.

• Evenly illuminating the talent might help reduce the spill on the downside of talent. You may want to consider using minus-green (magenta) filters on the lights that illuminate the talent.

• The color temperature of your lights has a minor effect on your keying performance. You should check with your camera to choose the light type which minimizes the image noise in your green and blue color channels.

• To minimize a spill reflected from the floor and walls of your cyclorama, use spill-killer light setup in your studio.

Image Resolution

Reality can generate a key using a high-resolution image input and downscale it in the rendering pipeline. To set an example, if you are broadcasting in 720p, you can set your input in 1080p, key a higher resolution image. This action will result in better visual quality.

Lens Flare

Lens flare in your image may affect your key. In such scenario using lens hood might be helpful.

Vignette

Vignetting may occur all along the zoom range, depending on the aperture and the focal length but usually vignette becomes more severe as you zoom in with your lens. Reconsidering your zoom level to talent might be helpful in achieving better result.