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Participant
October 15, 2026
Question

Premiere Ultra Key black clothing showing tiny sparkles, but not in Alpha

Using Ultra Key in Premiere, I see very brief, occasional white sparkles in various places in the black robe the actor is wearing. I have highlights at zero and Pedestal at 100. No other control seems to change or eliminate them.

    5 replies

    Participant
    October 18, 2026

    So I went back to the unedited/unhanced raw footage and the problem seems to be the cloth. Ultra key is just failing when there is a very light, small area in the cloth

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    Participant
    October 18, 2026

    I tried just doing the head with ultra,  but no change. I attach some screen shots. In the one that is the most uniformly black, you can see some wannbe sparkles. The material was shinny, not dull cloth

     

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    Community Expert
    October 18, 2026

    Wha color ar you keying out?

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    Community Expert
    October 16, 2026

    If you have access to After Effects you may want to try the Keylight effect if this continues.

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    Community Expert
    October 15, 2026

    Unless the area is completely black, it can be difficult to control with Ultra Key, especially if the source has compression artifacts (for example, from an H.264 MP4).

    Is it possible to use the new masking tool to mask and track only the area you want to keep, such as the actor’s face, and then apply Ultra Key within that masked area? That way, the robe is excluded entirely.

    Also, try setting the Spill Suppression values in Ultra Key to zero. Since the specks don’t appear in the Alpha Channel view, they may be coming from spill suppression changing the color of the robe rather than from the key itself.

    Finally, make sure you’re previewing at full playback resolution. If the specks disappear when you pause, enable High Quality Playback in the Program Monitor settings.

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