A good friend of mine has been a Pixel Corps member from practically the beginning of the organization. When he first tried the keyer dvMatte Blast for Motion and Final Cut Studio, he raved about the tool. At Toolfarm, I have the opportunity to try most of the plug-ins we sell, but we don't sell dvMatte Blast, hence I didn't have the chance to take it for a drive for a while.
Then, NAB 2007 came along and I was chosen to work at the Apple Booth to demo FxPlug plug-ins. FxPlug plug-ins are those plug-ins that tap into the GPU for acceleration and work with both Final Cut Pro and Motion, with one instance of installation. Because it works in FCP and Motion, one can work seamlessly between the two programs, without having to render, which can be a huge time saver. Most FxPlug plug-ins are very fast, and dvMatte Blast is no exception.
The same friend, mentioned above, works for a tv station and one Sunday we shot some footage over the weather green screen. At the station they use a hardware keyer that must be built to work specifically with this setup. We shot on the Sony xdCam HD F350 (with a 16x 2x extender lens). The footage is lit too hot, I know, and the beautiful model (that's me!) is standing too close to the green screen, which is causing some harsh shadows behind her. I used the lowest quality footage to really see how well a keyer works.
Ease of Use
dvMatte Blast is extremely simple to use. After the effect is applied, just choose the high color (the brightest shade of green or blue) and the low color (the area of your green or blue screen with the lowest luminance). I would prefer that something happen at this point - I love those plug-ins that work immediately, but all I need to do is switch the "Foreground" pulldown to "Composite" to see the effect. Not much effort, after all.
Pulling a nice key from dvMatte Blast is very easy to do.
