Greenscreen Of A Dog...feedback Please

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Nicholas Natteau

Veteran
This is my first green screen attempt ever with my HVX200, and I used no lighting at all. I took a dog statuette, bought a green cardboard from Staples, and used room lighting, no lighting kit. The HVX200 is amazing considering the scene was not even lit properly. The lit came from florescent tube lamps in the ceiling of the room.

I brought the clip into FCP, used "Blue and Green Screen setting" (set to Green) with following settings:

COLOR LEVEL: 39
TOLERANCE: 1
EDGE THIN: 96
FEATHER: 10

SPILL SUPPRESSOR: GREEN AT 100%

YOU CAN VIEW THE MOVIE HERE: http://web.mac.com/nicholasnatteau/DOG/Welcome.html

Please tell me if I used the right settings in FCP or should I tweak the numbers better. Am I using the right amount of color level? tolerance? edge thin? feather?

Thanks very much in advance,

- Nicholas
 
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You have to post the URL through the image tool thingy in the post whatchamacallit.

We're real technical around here.
 
in a case like this, where the dig is still the whole time, bring'er into photoshop, use the lasso tool, and be really fine, and exact with the key. Then it will look a lot better. This actually looked good.
 
yea the trick is when you start shooting a moving object in front of a green screen and have to deal with motion blur and green spill. for something like this you can just cut it out as an easy matte
 
Nicholas,

I think your key, and particularly the edges of your dog, looked really good. A lot cleaner than a greenscreen I did recently. And I agree with TheComo, for a subject that's standing still against a moving backdrop, using photoshop and getting a really exact key or an easy matte is probably the way to go.

That said, I tend to think you should adjust your settings(level, tolerance, feather, etc.) till your composition looks like you want it to. On the greenscreen I did recenly ( http://homepage.mac.com/todd_fowler/iMovieTheater27.html ) I used radically different settings for each shot - what a pain! Some I used a heavy choke and a lot of feather, others not so much. On some, I couldn't key out all the green to save my life and had to use mattes. Mine obviously suffered from my own inexperience and uneven ilghting, but I suppose the "look" of the composition should dictate the settings.
 
That was great Todd! Wow, evrything was dead on. In some scenes, it looked like it was g reenscreen and it looked as if they weren't really there, why does that happen? Cause in other shots you had, it worked!
 
TheComo,

Hey thanks...the opening shots we're exterior (shot in a vacant lot near my house). The greenscreen doesn't start till they dive behind the bunker. I tried hard to even out the two looks by going heavy on the color correction, and added a bunch of grain too...not sure well I managed to make them look consistent between the shots though.
 
OK, I tried doing it in Photoshop CS 3 and it turned out not nearly as good. I used the quick selection tool, and got it perfect in PS but upon bringing into FCP the dog showed up with green fringing around the edges. So what am I doing wrong in PS? I saved it as a PS file, as a pict file. But I must be doing something wrong. I tried several settings in FCP: white alpha, straight, etc. It's just showing up with green around the edges.
 
Did you feather the edges? REALLY zoom in on the picture you are cutting out. Geti it perfect, then control click (seeing your on a mac) and go to to the new feature, i think its under or ontop of feather. And play around with contrast, feather, roundness, all that good stuff.

OR do keylight in AE. Really helpful, especially with HD footage
 
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