Highly compressed green screen footage can be fixed and addressed
I have seen many projects come across my desk that need attention after all is said and finished and the original footage can’t be tracked down. Case in point, an experience worth sharing is when I was asked to work with footage heavily compressed/edited and add difficult visual effects to it.
“Hey Ian, can you use this low quality footage to composite a background?”
If I am producing and shooting a project myself, I’ll have the original raw footage to work with, giving me the best opportunity to manipulate it how I want. But when I’m called in with an audible, that original footage may be impossible to retrieve.
In the sample video, when adding typical keying tools, the compression was simply too much trouble to work with, causing all sorts of artifacting issues. You can see the fine details of the hair getting cut off. In this instance, I asked other subject matter experts to weigh in and they agreed about the low quality nature of the footage. But not all was lost…
For this solution, I was able to simply focus on AI tools to mask out the background. It could have been done by hand, but this was far easier, more reliable and cost effective. This goes to show that there are always solutions to be found.
At the end of the day, don’t give up hope on your dreams. Shoot me a message if you think we can achieve the impossible together!