FS-100 greenscreening

A

alaskacameradude

Veteran
I've got a shoot coming up that will be talking heads, shot on a greenscreen, and then later I will key them into 'white limbo'. Last time I did greenscreen was with DV and it was a royal pain getting even decent results (I know, DV sucks for greenscreen, but it's what I had.) I am wondering how the AVCHD footage from the FS-100 holds up for keying, I do not have an external recorder yet, and am wondering if anyone has done this yet. It seems to me, that if I shoot at 1080p, the web version (which is where the client wants the final product) should look better as the downrezzing may hide some of the ugly edges. Anyone done any greenscreen shoots with the FS-100 with the built in codec??
 
Go with a 4:2:2 8-bit recorder.

AVCHD will fall apart in chroma keying.

I'm assuming that this is a paid job, otherwise you could experiment to see how far you can go with the noiseless gain on the FS100.
 
ectobuilder said:
Go with a 4:2:2 8-bit recorder.

AVCHD will fall apart in chroma keying.

I'm assuming that this is a paid job, otherwise you could experiment to see how far you can go with the noiseless gain on the FS100.
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Unfortunately, I don't have time to wait for a recorder to be shipped all the way to Alaska for me to do this project, sounds like it's going to happen this week.
Also, if I did buy a recorder, it would basically eat up most of the money I am charging for this project (its about 3.5k for the whole project). I've keyed with DV
and made it look 'OK' before, I was thinking there was no way AVCHD would be worse than DV. But maybe I'm wrong....
 
check out some of the green screen examples in the pana af100 forum, some very nice keys with avchd, should give you a good idea, it is so much better than dv - sorry cant remember name of threads but shouldnt be hard to find
 
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A lot of it depends on are how good you are at pulling keys and what you are using to pull the keys. I use Keylight and Primatte with Digital Fusion. I have pulled some gorgeous keys with 4K Red Raw footage with Keylight and Fusion but I still needed multiple keys and masks.

If I get a chance I'll try to do a greenscreen shot over the weekend and see how it looks.
 
It will work just fine. Use keylight, do the two layer process, make sure the screen is nicely lit, don't let your backlight get too hot otherwise it will turn your edges purple and avoid excessive movement. I'm getting some nice keys with af100.
 
+1 to KeyLight. By far the best of readily available solutions. I did a lot of greenscreen work with XDCAM EX footage (probably hundreds of different set ups, mostly talking heads though) and of all the software/plugins I experimented with, KeyLight yielded the best results; on top of being very fast and easy to manipulate. That is of course you're familiar with AE.
 
bkmvincent said:
+1 to KeyLight. By far the best of readily available solutions. I did a lot of greenscreen work with XDCAM EX footage (probably hundreds of different set ups, mostly talking heads though) and of all the software/plugins I experimented with, KeyLight yielded the best results; on top of being very fast and easy to manipulate. That is of course you're familiar with AE.
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Keylight, Primmatte V5, Discreet's Master Keyer, DS's 3D keyer, Nuke's Image Based Keyer.... all good, but if the compression artifacts are larger than the width of hair, then no amount of mess'n with keys is going to help that...

Really depends upon what the target deliverable is.. for the web? take a shot and throw KeyLight at it in AE and walk away happy, for a feature going out to film? take the same shot mess with it for half of forever in Nuke, Flame or DS and it's still a pile of poop... and no one sits on a Flame or a DS unless they already know what they are doing fairly well already.

What defines a good (or good enough) resualt depends upon the deliverables more than the keyer software choice, in any case i would want to start with an uncompressed plate from an external recorder - even if i have to remove pull down first, and i would want to avoid working with 25mbs compression no matter how good the codec is in any case.

Define where the border of "good enough" sits, and define the deliverables, then figure out if the compression will wack you about the head and shoulders (or not).

May not matter, if it does matter, it matters a whole big bunch...

d
 
Dermot said:
Keylight, Primmatte V5, Discreet's Master Keyer, DS's 3D keyer, Nuke's Image Based Keyer.... all good, but if the compression artifacts are larger than the width of hair, then no amount of mess'n with keys is going to help that...

Really depends upon what the target deliverable is.. for the web? take a shot and throw KeyLight at it in AE and walk away happy, for a feature going out to film? take the same shot mess with it for half of forever in Nuke, Flame or DS and it's still a pile of poop... and no one sits on a Flame or a DS unless they already know what they are doing fairly well already.

What defines a good (or good enough) resualt depends upon the deliverables more than the keyer software choice, in any case i would want to start with an uncompressed plate from an external recorder - even if i have to remove pull down first, and i would want to avoid working with 25mbs compression no matter how good the codec is in any case.

Define where the border of "good enough" sits, and define the deliverables, then figure out if the compression will wack you about the head and shoulders (or not).

May not matter, if it does matter, it matters a whole big bunch...

d
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Welp, considering the OP mentioned this is for web, and that he doesn't own an external recorder, the best he can do is work with what he has.

Bottom line: don't expect phenomenal results, but at the very least you can do yourself a favor and work with a plugin that works well in its own right.
 
ectobuilder said:
AVCHD will fall apart in chroma keying.

AVCHD will not fall apart when pulling a key, (as long as the green screen is lit the way it supposed to and the talent as well)
I've been doing it for more than a year on over 30 spots for regional and national clients, 422 is better but if you have nothing else then
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Thanks for
all the info everyone. It is just a informational video. Main delivery is online. Secondary delivery may be to DVD (standard def). I have shot greenscreen with DV before, and I have just about every keying plugin you can think of, Keylight, DVMatte Pro, Key Correct Pro, PHYX Keyer, Primatte Keyer Pro, Ultimatte Advantage.....and so on. I had a contract in the past doing a lot of keying, and was working with DV at the time, so I purchased a whole BUNCH of keying software as it was a decent sized ongoing contract. But then, I haven't done any keying really for the past few years. I was thinking that there was no way that the AVCHD would be as hard as DV to key, even with really careful lighting and using all kinds of plug ins, I was only able to get 'OK' quality at best from DV. Just really blocky around the edges of the key, because of the 4:1:1 color sampling. I smoothed the edges with some of th features built in to the plug ins, and it looked OK. Anyways, I was thinking that the 1080P scaled down, might hide some of the edges and that it would be better to shoot with the FS-100 than to shoot with my old DV camera. The total budget that I am being paid is 3.5K, so obviously not a feature or anything
 
So I finished producing this 'info' video. Obviously it is NOT something that I would normally post for people to watch, it is a video for the local PD going through the steps needed to
apply for a job. They didn't want to continue to waste time walking people through the process on the phone or in person, so they hired me to do a video.....pretty boring compared
to what many people on this board are doing, but it helps pay the bills. Anyways, you can get an idea of how the FS-100 stands up to greenscreen work by watching a little of the
video (I wouldn't recommend watching too much as I said, pretty dry stuff!) Keying wise, it seems MUCH better than DV which is what I was using before.....anyways here's the video link:

http://exposureroom.com/members/alaskacameradude/8fc3bfd27798488198dd9a67b5c7373f/
 
If you plan only to key over a white limbo, then green screen is NOT your best option.Shoot with a white limbo background. Light it as you would a green screen. At this point you'll have two choices. Use as is, if the white background you hung was clean enough and just the right brightness, or do a luma key. With the luma key you can replace the background white you shot with a pure graphic white and avoid all artifacts and color fringing that are can be so annoying with chroma keys, especially with 8 bit compressed formats.
 
Mark Crabtree said:
If you plan only to key over a white limbo, then green screen is NOT your best option.Shoot with a white limbo background. Light it as you would a green screen. At this point you'll have two choices. Use as is, if the white background you hung was clean enough and just the right brightness, or do a luma key. With the luma key you can replace the background white you shot with a pure graphic white and avoid all artifacts and color fringing that are can be so annoying with chroma keys, especially with 8 bit compressed formats.
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Ahh....I wasn't aware of that. One question. Wouldn't the luma key also start to get some of the subjects skin tones in it to key out as well? I thought that was one reason to use a blue
or green screen, because they were far away from a person's skin tone.
 
Okay, here is your options IMHO.

1. It´s doable if you lit the screen very well.
2. Like someone said, if the artifacts are bigger than a hair - that´s where it gets um.. hairy.

If you run into a situation like that, convert that critical part to uncompressed and go from there - it may add just enough to solve your problems.

Your other option is - if you have assess to a workstation with video capture card - use that as a recorder.

Good luck, Frank
 
For a project I got shots from FS-100 with AVCHD, with nano-flash and from Nex VG-10 AVCHD. Nano flash is better but, other ones don't have a problem too. Even for some shots our green screen wasn't evenly lit and had some wrinkles. It is better if you can lit your green screen evenly and one stop less than object. You can use a magenta gel on back light for reducing reflection of green screen on the object. Last year for same kind of project I didn't use magenta gel on backlight and I had some keying problems. Keylight enoug for keying.
 
alaskacameradude said:
Ahh....I wasn't aware of that. One question. Wouldn't the luma key also start to get some of the subjects skin tones in it to key out as well? I thought that was one reason to use a blueor green screen, because they were far away from a person's skin tone.
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If you light the white background at 100 to 105 on a waveform or zebras set to 100, you will get a good key and have no issues with skin tones. The biggest issue with a key is the edge. The camera will naturally maintain ALL the edge detail between the physical background and the actor, (Fine hair detail, etc.). When you key white over white, any loosely clipped areas around the edge are not noticed because EVERTHING is white. Try it, we do it often and it looks like NO key was done. If you do have any issues with bright skin tones you can easily use a garbage matte. We never need to.
 
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