Green Screen Shoot out: T2i vs 7D vs HPX-170 vs EX-3

PDR said:
Thanks for taking the time to share this

Did you key the native footage from each camera in AE , or use an intermediate?
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Hi PDR,

It was keyed in After Effects, using the KEYLIGHT setting under "keying." It's an amazingly easy key. In fact, with the EX footage, I didn't even need to make adjustments.
 
Hi , let me rephrase - did you key the footage as is (straight from each camera, imported into AE), or did you use transcode to a digital intermediate format (e.g. cineform, uncompressed, prores etc...)
 
Sorry, mine Inglish not Fery goot ....

No these are transcoded Prores clips, compressed into a 1280 x 720 H.264. That means that the 1920 x 1080 stuff got downres'd . This version just looked more accurate for what we were doing.
 
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Spiral said:
..... it continues to shoot a warm- yellow like hue that consistently needs to be corrected, even when white balance is set on every shot.
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The HPX170 does have some down sides, but I think from its price point and the fact that it has 3ccd's instead of CMOS imaging to element any shutter roll issues, the hpx is a solid device.

With any camera under 10k using highly compressed formats you can expect these quirks.

For green/blue screen
I have found that using a scene file like SPARK seems to fix that (yellowing) problem. It also help one get a better chroma key. Make sure you set the Spark scene file to Video for the full 60fps unless you want a lower variable frame rate.

Also using FCP log and transfer will change the coloring a bit form the .MXF file... just saying.

Oh one more thing, it looked like the lighting was a bit low for the recording or the video example. I have found that green screen lighting needs to be good and hot so you don't get grain and artifacts.
 
The skin-tone produced by the EX-3 for this shoot is absolutely horrible. Very likely it's just a matter of camera color-balance and adjusting things in post.

The HPX-170 footage looked low contrast ( and yellow-ish color ), which is also a matter of adjusting the camera settings and how the footage is treated in post.

The T2i footage had a bit of the "cardboard-cutout" thing happening on edges which is likely caused by the softness of the video image that the Canon DSLRs produce.

If I had to choose between these 3 different cameras, it would be a toss up between the HPX-170 and the EX-3, assuming that the color and contrast issues were solved in camera or in post production.
 
So with the DVCPRO HD restrictions, what would be the ideal settings to use when shooting green screen (on the HPX170)?
 
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Days of the bumpin' it seems... Zacuto did tests in their first shootout. They showed a clean key out of d3s' 720 mjpeg on the big screen... Even the cheapest keying software is VERY powerful these days.

But no, a DSLR would not be my first choice in a greenscreen studio. And not cus it's 4.2.0, but cus it's false resolution.
 
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