GH1 first test, greenscreen

[msorrels]

http://vimeo.com/5898437

It's kind of embarrassingly bad. I'm no actor. The room was way too small. It's really hard to drive a new camera and be in front of it.

The 1080 workflow was kind of harder than I had hoped. In the end I had to use avisynth to remove the pulldown and get a 24p stream. Getting that to work inside After Effects was a lot more pain than I expected. Everytime I'd render anything in AE I'd lose the sound on my workstation. Which seemed kind of odd. I'd have to unplug and replug (or reboot) my firewire Saffire sound interface to get it back. I'm thinking it's Quicktime though, since I was trying to use Quicktime animation codec as my intermediate format. Quicktime sound options seem kind of weak on a PC.

There is some codec-y mud around my fingers and the shadow on my face. It's in the original footage as well, I don't think it was added during the conversion processes. It's not awful but I was kind of surprised. I really need to redo it at 720p. And pay a lot more attention to settings. It was kind of difficult to fully explore all the different settings from in front of the camera.

Pulling the key with keylight wasn't hard at all. Not really happy with the Magic Bullet look I ended up using (it's a modified version of one of their presets). The background was just a quick render of a poser set I had. More time matching up the lighting would have helped that I think. The muzzle flashes are from Video Copilot's Action Essentials 1.

Did the sound in Vegas (and the final render) using the Quicktime animation-codec created files from AE CS3. The gunshots are from a couple of sound effect libraries I have bought.

 

[Peter J. DeCrescenzo]

... More time matching up the lighting would have helped that I think. ...

Thanks for this. Not bad for a first attempt.

Light direction: Matching the direction of the main key light in the foreground plate to the direction of the light in the background would go a long way to help "sell" the final comp. In this clip the actor (you) should be looking almost directly into the main key light (if the foreground light direction matched the background light direction), and as a result the side of your face & body would be in shadow. This would make the lighting more dramatic, too.

Perhaps dim (scrim) the light, too, and maybe put something off-camera so it casts a partial shadow on your face or body for more drama. For example, a real tree branch with some leaves on it (off camera) being blown by a small fan can yield some nice animated shadows into a scene, in this case, as if there was a tree between a street light (as if it were the key light) and the actor (you).

Lighting color (color temp): Matching the color of the lighting (white balance) of the foreground plate to the color of the background lighting would help a lot, too.

Depth of field: Since this scene is at "night", typically a wide-open/fast lens would be used, so the audience might expect the talent (you) to be in focus and the background possibly slightly out of focus. Likewise there might be a prop on camera in the extreme foreground slightly out of focus. However, there have been many, many "night" scenes in TV & film in which everything is magically in sharp focus. This is often because they were shot "day for night" at relatively high f-stops yielding deep DOF. As a result, light direction & color temp are probably more important than DOF techniques in "selling" a chroma key.

But it's a good beginning. I'm looking forward to seeing further attempts!