DVK-300HD Impresses
Apr 21 2014
If you went by trade shows, you'd get a very skewed impression of the market. Some products attract visitors like ravens around road kill, but crowds don't always turn into sales. Go by audience size and you'd think the whole world was already shooting 4K, editing on Quantel and finishing with Smoke.
Datavideo's DVK-300HD wasn't quite in this league at BVE but it certainly drew a lot of interest. But it wasn't until we took the product on a post-show tour that we realised quite how popular it would be.
The DVK-300HD is a standalone chromakeyer. This may not sound all that exciting as a lot of vision mixers have chromakey features built in. But few have this level of control over results:
There's obviously a lot going on under the hood here. And the results show it.
If your green screen studio has been lit by a Hollywood lighting director and your backdrop is freshly painted with an exact pantone emulsion, you may not need the DVK. But for everyone else, this piece of kit is the perfect solution. Over the last couple of weeks, we've thrown a lot of challenges its way - fine hair, low-contrast clothes - and with a bit of tweaking we've achieved results that have really impressed customers. 
We've seen other systems that look more like the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts than Sandra Bullock's Gravity.
Somehow composited pictures look much more realistic and natural with the DVK.