Writings about film making by Jason Hawkins

dvMatte Pro 3

Posted by Jason on January 31st, 2008

If you’ve ever tried to do it yourself, keying DV footage can ruin your day. The out-of-the-box offerings in Final Cut Studio 2 don’t really cut it, and trying to make a keyer yourself is, to put it mildly, insane. After spending some fruitless nights with the keyers in Final Cut Pro, and Primatte in Motion, I started to look for another, third-party, keyer.

I remember hearing something about Ultra 2 from back in the day. I recall it being really expensive, but especially powerful. Particularly on DV footage. Great, I thought. I mean sure it’s expensive but they’ve probably got a trial available. I’ll just check it out and… oh, Adobe bought them and the product is Windows-only?

Crap.

Which is when I found dvGarage, a small video-focused software company headed up by none other than Alex Lindsay, video professional extraordinaire and beloved TV personality. Hooray! Turns out dvGarage makes a ton of useful software including the just-released dvMatte Pro 3.

This is really the all-in-one solution you need if you’re going to attempt a solid, professional-grade key from DV footage. It comes at a bit of a price, though. $199 snags you the keyer, a screen-fixing tool for poorly shot footage, a light wrapping tool (super awesome, btw), and a handy filter for matching color spaces in your foreground and background images. Wow. And actually, if you make your purchase before February 15th, they’ll even knock off 50 big-ones. How swell is that?

Now, I can understand if you feel like $150 is still a little high for a plugin. Especially if you’ve never bought one before, and even more so for one that weighs in at a pizzly 155KB. That sort of thing tends to sting you right where it hurts the most. But is it worth it?

In a word, yes.

No kidding. If you need a keyer, and you need it to be the kind of high-grade stuff that will impress your clients, colleagues, friends, and family, then look no further. Do what you need to for the money. Get a job, find a client, save up, or familiarize yourself with Craigslist. You (and your clients) will be happy you did.

These images are the real deal: Pulling a key from DV footage is fast and unbelievably easy.

dvMatte Pro’s approach to pulling the perfect key is pretty straight forward. It’s also extremely powerful under the hood, yet light on processor resources. That’s because the software now utilizes your computer’s GPU, instead of pestering your main processor(s) to do its work. This means faster rendering and instant visualization of what your final key looks like. The interface itself works like a sort-of-checklist that allows you to tweak each variable individually to get the results you need. That’s not to say that the automatic key isn’t any good, it just usually takes some minor tweaking to get things right.

The quartet of plugins work in both Final Cut Pro 6 and Motion 3, and appear to behave exactly the same in either. This is great news if your workflow tends to keep you in say, Motion more than FCP.

The 18-page PDF included with a purchase has in-depth coverage on all of the plugins. This is perfect for getting started, and handy for reference later on. If you’re at all familiar with Apple’s Pro App manuals you’ll feel right at home.

There’s plenty to discover here, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say as I familiarize myself with the software. For now, you should head over to dvGarage and download the demo and check it out for yourself.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 5:13 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.