It’s all on green walls and your lightings! You should have same edge key quality all over your talents. If not, you don’t have good lighting on your green walls. Aximmetry is far away from Pixotope or Zero Density in terms of keying, but you can get some good results if your background is darker than your talents, especially on the floor. Use a lot of light on your walls and diffuse it widely. It’s a good enough low-cost solution. If not, prepare to spend a lot more of money to get what you see on professional TV Shows! I know, it’s a shame, but still, Aximmetry is a good start!

Also you might want to check how the footage is coming in, in order to get the best result the footage needs to be 100% uncompressed as any compression artifacts will make clean keying extremely hard.

(I personally currently use a Elgato Camlink 4k to hook up a Canon R5 to aximmetry and there definitely are some issues with getting a proper key because of the very small artifacting happening due to compression)

@Ferlaur: The Aximmetry keyer is not far away from Pixotope or Zero Density at all. In fact, it can give better results than both in some cases. It all depends on how you set the parameters. I’ve done some thorough comparisons, so I speak from experience. 

Dear Ferlaur,

You may be right, I tried with Tricaster, it even key better than Aximmetry, with same camera and same green space with same lighting. 

Deeta Production,

I get a better result when I take 2160p input. 

Please see the attached picture with Full HD keying on Tricaster and Aximmetry.

@Debasish: If you get better results in Tricaster you’re definitely not using the Aximmetry keyer correctly. Trust me, we have a TC 2 Elite and it’s mikes behind in terms of quality. Looking at your screen shot there is something very strange going on with your Aximmetry keying. Are you using Edge Color Correction?

Here is one example using the Aximmetry keyer in our studio:

Here is another on bright background using compressed sample footage:

@TwentyStudios, nice, but it would be appropriate to show a video instead of a picture. I can do magic with still too, but when it comes to people talking, hairs in motion, blur from movements, it's another story! And I don't think right now Aximmetry is a safe Broadcast keyer. I don't work with virtual cams, it's way too blurry ("Allow vitals" is not a finished function) I use SDI's inputs in 1080-25p from Declink pro. If my lighting is correct on green screen, I get quite-usable shots, but with strange blurry edges. Maybe when I'll go 4K, I'll be able to reduce edge flickering. So I'm waiting for improvements from Aximmetry. I do virtual sets with 7 or 8 Real cameras, so 4 K is just a dream for me! Thank you for your time and sharing. I appreciate.

Dear Twenty Studios,

I am using Advanced B keyer, if I use 4k, I am getting some better result, but still not acceptable. I don't know what I am doing wrong. The worst part is there is no after sales support from Aximmetry, they are asking for almost similar amount what the software cost for support. 

By the way with sample videos it is fine. 

I am now waiting for my machine and lights to arrive, once those are there I will have training and key setup from Aximmetry. Till then I will pause the project. 

Thanks & Regards,

Debasish

@Felaur: Going 4K will definitely improve the results, but I’ve seen some great examples with 1080p as well. The problem with 1080p is the 422 color subsampling (not a problem with Aximmetry) where you’ll only get half the resolution on the color channels. This isn’t very noticeable with regular footage, but it becomes a huge issue with keying since it will cause blurry edges and lost fine details in the transition areas between the foreground and the green. Do you have a screen shot of your keyer settings? Are you using the Clean Plate function? 

I agree that the Virtuals are not as good as it should be. It’s decent if you render everything in 4K, but in 1080p it’s far too blurry.

I can’t share most of what we do, but here are a couple of examples:

https://www.realplay.se/video/s-realplay-studio-bors-special-vad-driver-fastighetsbolagens-borskurser-just-nu-9tpkx7

https://youtu.be/jr59FnSqmAc

They are far from perfect due to very limited time to tweak settings (a couple of minutes at most) but I don’t think we would have gotten better result with another keyer. 

@TwentyStudios any way you could share insight to your keyer settings, im still having a bit of issues with individual hair strands losing color and turning into a grey blob basically but from your images that doesnt seem to be issue at all.

I'm wondering if its just something i'm messing up with how the footage is either recorded or coming to aximmetry..

@DeataProduction: Are you sending the footage to Aximmetry in 4K with Aximmetry set to 4K as well? That’s the “key” ;-) 

I basically set the high and low cut as close to their left and rightmost positions as possible, utilizing the clean plate function to counter any uneven lighting on the green. The other stuff like edge color correction I tend to use as little as possible, except I’m dealing with a troublesome keying subject. 

If your hair details become a gray mush it’s most likely because you have too much green spill and/or are putting too much lights on the green background. Contrary to what many believe, you should but as little light as possible on the green while still avoiding shadows and getting it as even as possible. Many studios also use the way too bright digi green color for their screen. That will just blast your sensor with saturated greens and spill onto your subject if you don’t have a large enough studio with several meters of space between the subject and the green. Learnt that the hard way… 

Dear All,

I got some good result with 4K output from the camera. Also if I tilt the camera with 90 degree rotation with 4K out the desired output will be definitely reached.

So that's the conclusion I think for me and many others. It has to be 4K and 90 degree rotation of the camera must be there. Sadly Aximmetry team doesn't tell us and even the supported card option is not updated. I purchased Bluefish Supernova as per the Aximmetry website recommendation and that card does not support 4k out. So I have to buy new card for this.

Warm Regards,
Debasish

@Debasish: 90 degree rotation isn’t necessary to get good keying results. How much are you zooming into the footage and what camera are you using? If you need to zoom far in or have a lower quality camera it can of course help, but it’s not something that is routinely done. 

What didn’t Aximmetry tell you? I’m not familiar with the Supernova, but you don’t need 4K output to use 4K input. We use a full 4K pipeline inside Aximmetry but scale down to 1080p at the last step before output. 

Dear Twenty Studios,

Yes you are right, I tried to Zoom in to get a close shot from full length actual shot, so 90 degree rotation helped me. I thought that it will be useful when we have just 1 camera (which can be used for both long shot and closer shot using digital zoom). 

But I believe Aximmetry must mention this 4K input for the software  and the supported hardware must support 4K. The supernova CG does not accept 4K input. 

@Debasish: I don’t understand what you mean? You can get good results with a 1080p camera if you don’t zoom in too far and you can get awful results with a 4K camera if you don’t set up your green screen and lights correctly. In your particular case you need 4K input to accomplish what you want, but that doesn’t mean it’s a universal requirement. Aximmetry supplies some of the tools, but it’s up to you to bring the knowledge and the rest of the carefully considered equipment.  I don’t think it’s their responsibility to say if you should use a webcam or an Arri Alexa. Same thing with resolution. Next time a user come along and has bought both an Arri and a 4K capture card but blames them for bad results because they haven’t got proper lights or picked the wrong green screen color for their studio. 

It’s not like you need super high end equipment either. We use Sony FS7 in our studio, and that’s an 8 year old camera! 

Btw, looking at some of your screen shots, I think you have the Edge Color Correction turned way up? That can cause a lot of strange issues and I leave it of or at very low settings most of the time. Use the Clean Plate function, touch the Low and High cut values as little as possible and leave the others adjustments at zero if you don’t need them. That should give you great results even in 1080p if the rest of your signals chain holds up and you don’t zoom in too much.