Production Switchers

I have tried various settings with no success in getting a clean chroma key. No matter what we get dancing noise around edges of the talent. I suspect that it's because we are up and down converting video through our Carbonite to and from analog standad def. What I'd like to know is if there are some suggestions on settings that would help in cleaning up the chroma key. We are using Sony D30 cameras and recording to a Sony UVW 1800 with Gearlite to do up/down conversion. We have done several lighting tweaks to try to fix it with no success. Is this something that can be improved or is this the nature of the beast?

Hi Eileen,

Getting a clean chroma key edge when the original signal is analog composite is practically impossible I'm afraid. Even when we were all using analog, the camera used for a good chroma key was typically feeding out component analog to avoid encoding artifacts. The fact that you are up converting to HD will not be a major problem with the chroma keyer, the NTSC encoded analog signal is the culprit as there is a great deal of chroma aliasing in the edges of a composite signal.

The Sony camera you mentioned can output component but only from a CCU, if you dont have one you might find one inexpensively on ebay. However, the best solution is would be to use a camera with SD or HD SDI output as that is a digital component signal.

#Carbonite