Digital Film Tools’ zMatte is a keying plugin that has developed quite a following. The current version, zMatte 2.0, is much easier to use than earlier versions that were very counter-intuitive. The new control interface is vastly improved and much easier to understand. It includes a nice Light Wrap feature (which we’ll test) and an independent secondary matte that allows cleanup of less-than-perfect original footage. Let’s try it out!
To Perform this Tutorial, You Will Need:
In AE, start a new composition set for 24p 16:9 DV (NTSC DV widescreen, 1.2 pixel aspect ratio, 23.976fps). Now import the file ruins_gr.mov and the still cityruins.jpg.
Note: This cool matte painting was done by Natiq Aghayev (known online as Defonten), a talented young artist in Azerbaijan. It’s mostly hand-painted in Photoshop, with some 3D elements from Softimage XSI. Thanks to Defonten for permission to use this pic!
Place the background file on the composition timeline and the greenscreen file above it. Now, in order to have the couple looking at the ruins, move the ruins_gr.mov file to the left until the girl’s shoulder is nearly touching the edge of the frame, and she is mostly in front of the sun. Because the file includes material off the edges of the greenscreen, we’ll have to use a garbage matte later.
Now, with the greenscreen file selected, go to Effects>DFT zMatte V2>zMatte Keyer to apply it to the footage. Under the Primary Matte control section, change the Extract On dropdown list to Greenscreen. You may want to experiment a bit to see what the other settings do, but for this footage the setting must be Greenscreen.
The immediate result shows horrible jaggies from the undersampled footage. Let’s eliminate those now. Open De-artifact and click on the Enable checkbox. Now that Deartifact is enabled, set the Horizontal Blur to 3 or 4 (since the footage is 4:1:1). You should suddenly have a nice clean edge without jaggies! If you are working with 4:2:0 footage such as HDV, you would set Horizontal Blur to 1 or 2 and Vertical Blur to 1 or 2.
