Green screen paint color

Brandon Rice

Brandon Rice

Distributed Producer
Ok, I know you can get the "Chroma Green" paint for like $100 a gallon, but what if I want to just go to Home Depot and get some paint for a Green Screen. What is the closest paint number, or name of a paint I should get? Thanks!
 
Think green... as in color bar green.

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Yeah. Find a sample that's close to it. It's pure green (spectral green), so they've got to have something in stock that's not too far off.

You can also take a different approach and use pure green posterboard panels instead of paint. It's not hard to find the right color, and depending on the size of what you planned to make, it COULD be cheaper than paint.
 
I actually took a different piece of advice from Hudson and went to the fabric store and got a bunch of green fabric. It works great.

The other alternative that I have used is using a bunch of green nylon fabric (my father sells it so I get it for nothing) and that works really well also.

The paint is pricey if you get the legit stuff and it takes multiple coats.

Good luck.

Jeremy
 
David Jimerson said:
Yeah. Find a sample that's close to it. It's pure green (spectral green), so they've got to have something in stock that's not too far off.

You can also take a different approach and use pure green posterboard panels instead of paint. It's not hard to find the right color, and depending on the size of what you planned to make, it COULD be cheaper than paint.
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True, this is for someone else actually, who asked me what to use. They want to paint a wall, just for waist up shots. THanks for the help guys!
 
TheYankee said:
The paint is pricey if you get the legit stuff and it takes multiple coats.

Good luck.

Jeremy
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True, the "real" stuff is pricey, but I am convinced it doesn't take the "real" stuff to work. I mean, when we're keying stuff out here at work there are various shades of green in an individual shot with shadows and stuff. The keyers are now so powerful they're very good at seperating the colors.
 
I did a quick Green screen test on our weather set this afternoon with the HVX and the results were stunning. We have a million dollar switcher with $80,000 cameras that did not look as good as this little Panasonic. I dropped the 30 second clip into my Canopus Edius time line and added the Chroma Key effect and BINGO.:) The thing keyed perfectly without any adjustments. Format was 1080i.

Boy I like this camera.

jim
 
Yessah, the green fabric is a good way to go. I went to WalMart and just eyeballed the fabric samples, picked out a nice bright green and had em cut me a large section off and just tacked it onto the wall. It took a little doing to get it ironed out...iron, stretch and retack. Works quite well.
 
Briceman-

Behr has a standard mix that works well for green screen paint. You can find it at Home Depot.

S-G-440 "Green Acres".
 
jaustere said:
Briceman-

Behr has a standard mix that works well for green screen paint. You can find it at Home Depot.

S-G-440 "Green Acres".
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THank you very much, that's exactly what I was looking for! :thumbsup:
 
Do you guys find that green is definetly the way to go now? The reason I ask is becasue I needed to do some chroma keying last week for a friend. I went to the fabric store and bought the closest thing to pure green i could find. Unfortunetly, it wasnt pure green, but rather a flourescent green/yellow. I still thought it would work though. And it did except for the nasty spill i was getting around the shoulders of the subject. I tried all sorts of variables to get rid of it like backlighting and seperating the subject from the screen. Nothing worked.

Now i understand that i wasnt even using a pure green color, but when i was researching the differances betweeen green and blue chroma keying, i found a lot of people swearing by the fact the blue gives of much less of a reflection of light and thus prevents "spill."

I notice that on the link above (http://www.mjrworld.com/newwork/newwork.html) there is some green spill on the subject.

Any opinions? Preferances. It does seem everyone is using green these days.

~ Jim
 
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Green is cleaner for keying with DV - and infact most any compressed video - becuse of the way the compression works.

Blue is less found in nature (That's why it was originally chosen for keying) and also has a lower lumanace value, therefore less spill.

If you are working with uncompressed (expecially) video, then blue is the way to go. If you are working with DV, then green will give you the best results.

Contrary to comon belife, it's a misconception (that I've made too) that "bright" green works well. The idea is to get a very colorfull green. - Meaning a deep green. Normally, becuse of spill form high luma, it's better to err on the darker side when chosing green.

- Mikko
 
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