green screen shooting

U

urbanfx

Active member
hi guys, 1 week before my shoot and I just wanted to ask if anyone has experience with green screens, for my short film ill have 1 scene where a guy is washing his face in the bathroom and then he looks up into the mirrow and sees himself standing behind him as a ghost..

where do I have to be carefull, lights, etc.. what the best way to approach this? any hints?
 
Re: green screen shooting

make sure your green screen is evenly lit, have the subject suffiecntly far from the screen and zoom in, or bring the camera closer, make sure you back light the subject, some use magenta for back light, have good separation of lighting so no shadows fall on the screen, and no hot spots on the screen or uneven lighting. this will make pulling a key easier.

good luck
 
Re: green screen shooting

I recently shot my first green screen footage at my church with some chroma green "shower curtain" style sheets we taped to the wall. We shot in a pretty bright room, and lit the screens and talent from the front. I thought we had it all under control until I checked the footage later. I had forgotten to turn off the bright overhead lights, so we have horizontal shadows from the "shower curtains" that I can't get rid of in Premiere 6.5. BIG LESSON!

Our church has a copy of Ultrakey, so I'm thinking about running the footage through it, to see if it can handle it better than Premiere. Otherwise, I'll have to be going through each and every one of these interstitial shots (6 to 16 seconds each) and touch up all the frames to remove the shadows. Ugggggghhhhh!!

So, don't forget to pay attention to the possible negative effects secondary light sources can cause.

--David
 
Re: green screen shooting

My first (and only) green screen shooting went fairly well, in spite of the fact that my screen (a green painted wall) was not as evenly lit as it should be.

I used Vegas 4.0 to do my key, and it did very well. Honestly, I have nothing to compare Vegas with, so I can't say from personal experience if it's better than Premiere (although newsgroup discussions tend to indicate that the Vegas chromakey is superior to/more configurable than Premiere).

Also, make sure you shoot with the iris at or close to wide open. And shoot, as mentioned before, with as long a zoom as you have room for. Wide-open aperture + long focal length will do the best job of dropping your green screen out of focus (which will make for a better key).

Good luck,
David
 
Re: green screen shooting

Hey, Brendan.

I wish I could get a hold of AE for this, but neither I nor my church owns it (and I don't have $400 to buy a copy off of Ebay). I'm hoping to be able to use my church's copy of Ultrakey to fix everything. The Premiere chroma is fairly miserable, I've been finding. I'm bummed.

On the thought of how far away from the screen to be, I think I was about 15 to 18 feet away, but still couldn't open up the iris all the way. That was another issue related to my leaving the overhead lights on. If I only could've blurred my background a bit... Oh, well, I learned several lessons my first time out. Next time will go smoother (I hope!).

--David
 
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