Hawaiki Keyer 5 - Manual

Tutorials

New in Hawaiki Keyer 5

Intro

Primary and Secondary - Basics

Screen Clean

Secondary Keyer

Even the best keyers in the world sometimes can't give you the perfect key for all areas of your shot in one go and often you might find that you are compromising one area in order to get the required result in another area and it can get very frustrating very quickly.

In Hawaiki Keyer 5 when you engage Secondary you have access to two keyers in one and it's a very easy job to break up your shot into two distinct areas so as to get the best result for each one. This is especially advisable for preserving hair detail which is usually the first thing to suffer when you try to make one key do all the work.

Noise

Keying hair can be tricky, especially if the source footage has a lot of noise. This is something you might not see looking at the the four channel (RGBA) image but if you switch to viewing just a single channel - red, green or blue - you’re more likely to notice it. Hawaiki Keyer, like most green/blue screen keyers, extracts a matte by comparing the green or blue channel to one or both of the other two channels. When any of these channels has significant noise some of the matte values change randomly, resulting in edges that bubble or flicker.

Running the footage through a dedicated denoising plug-in or app can help. We recommend exporting the denoised version to disk and re-importing before applying Hawaiki Keyer.

Manual Adjustments

Proceed carefully when adjusting the manual controls. Use the relevant view mode as you work, making only gradual, fine adjustments until you've only just got the result you need. The key thing to bear in mind is that more is not better - just enough and no more is what you should always be aiming for.

Shooting tips

• Shoot at the lowest ISO as possible to mimimize noise - you may need more light than for a standard shoot.

• Turn off all in-camera sharpening.

• Use the least compressed codec your camera offers - e.g 4:2:2 10-bit is preferable to 4:2:0 8-bit.

• Ensure there is adequate distance between the screen and the talent - VES recommend around 4 metres, which might not be achievable, but try to make it at least 2 to 3 metres.

• Light your foreground/talent to match the lighting in your background plate.

• Light the screen separately from the talent.

• Ensure your backing/screen has adequate saturation.

• To minimize spill use flags to mask areas of the screen that are not behind the foreground.

Further help

Hawaiki Keyer 5 offers you a wide range of different but complementary strategies that you can use depending on the source material, but you may well find cases where you can't work out the best approach. If you need help, we are always happy to look at your footage and consult on the best way of getting a good result.