5 Replies Latest reply: Aug 30, 2009 11:08 PM by Mylenium RSS

    Keylight screen color picker only works sporadically

    Rich Pulham Community Member

      I'm doing a lot of green screen compositing (CS4).  At first, Keylight worked great.  But now it is getting to where it doesn't work at all.

       

      I select my green screen with the color picker eye dropper and nothing happens.  The color shown is black.  I can try to pick the color manually and it still doesn't change.  The color picker should change colors as you pass the eye dropper over various colors but it doesn't.

       

      I also have problems with the in Paint.

       

      Any ideas?

       

      Rich

        • 1. Re: Keylight screen color picker only works sporadically
          Adolfo Rozenfeld Adobe Employee

          First time I hear about this, seems like the color picker could be sampling the background color (which you normally get by adding the Shift key when sampling). Have you tried re-creating preferences?

          • 2. Re: Keylight screen color picker only works sporadically
            Mylenium CommunityMVP

            What footage types do you use? The only times I have observed this, is with a few compressed footage formats. The color sampler will then not work on some frames, probably due to how they are reconstructed from otehr frames and/or AE uses hardware acceleration for some of those formats (MediaCore). Does it work, if you simply pre-compose the source footage and then apply the keyer to the pre-comp?

             

            Mylenium

            • 3. Re: Keylight screen color picker only works sporadically
              Rich Pulham Community Member

              This is an unmodified clip.  The background color, if you are referring to the color behind the subject, is chroma green.  The color picker does nothing.

               

              I've also made changes to my preferences but it makes not difference.

              • 4. Re: Keylight screen color picker only works sporadically
                Adolfo Rozenfeld Adobe Employee

                No, background color is the color shown behid all layers. Normally, it's not sampled by eye droppers because it's not really an entity - an alternative for transparency. That's why you have to shift-click to sample from it, and that could happen if you had caps lock enabled, for example. Since by default is black, that suggests that perhaps the eye dropper could be sampling the background color.

                I didn't mean modfying preferences, but renaming or deleting the text file which stores the preferences. It resides in different locations for Mac OS, XP and Vista. If you tell me your OS, I'll point you to the right location.

                • 5. Re: Keylight screen color picker only works sporadically
                  Mylenium CommunityMVP

                  Simply delete them/ move them to a different location. For the actual location of the files, please refer to this article on my AE errors database (or some others thereon for that matter). Still, I'd not completely rule out issues with the footage types used and your graphics hardware, so a bit of investigation on that end might be okay. A good indicator would e.g. be if the color picker shows color values in the info palette while you are over otehr interface elements, but not when you are working in the footage/layer/composition windows. In that case, a good guess would be the Accelerate Footage, Layer and Composition Panels option in your prefs....

                   

                  Mylenium