When Canadian facility, Station 29 Postproduction were looking for a keyer to tackle the extensive low light green screen keys within Human Trafficking, Keylight ticked all the boxes, delivering realistic results in minimum time.
Human Trafficking is Lifetime Television’s first ever miniseries and they are definitely pulling out all the stops. Directed by Christian Duguay and stars Mira Sorvino, Donald Sutherland and Robert Carlisle. The $15-million two-part ‘movie of the week’ is based on horrific true facts about the illegal trafficking of women and children, abducted around the world and forced into sex slavery.
Keylight was used extensively, Serge Verreault, DS Artist, Station 29 explains “we shot on Super 16mm and then transferred the regular footage to HDCAM, with all the green screens on HDCAMSR. Most of the interior car scenes were shot on green screen with a hand held camera, so that involved a lot of tracking and tracker removal. Human Trafficking involves a lot of low light green screen keys, many of the shots had numerous artefacts and a considerable amount of grain, making the extraction of a good clean key all the more difficult. We tested a number of different keyers; Keylight was the most efficient and gave us the best results. I was able to extract a clean key in minimal time and I was even able to extract a key when the green wasn’t so green and evenly lit!”
Using Keylight Verreault applied a technique known as light wrap over the keys. The light wrap effect allows you to superimpose glowing background light around foreground objects to smooth the edges of the main objects within the image. Verreault comments, “to achieve the light wrap effect, I used Keylight’s ‘show edges’ function and extracted a matte of the image, I then re-applied it over my main images to ‘spill’ or ‘light wrap’ the surrounding background. Without Keylight it would have been far more complex to achieve the desired effect.”
Verreault concludes “No matter what the circumstances Keylight allowed me to quickly extract good clean mattes without any difficulty. Keylight is definitely one of the most powerful easy to use, keyers on the market. For serious keying jobs Keylight is your tool!”