Greenscreen question

T

thesubtext

New member
Might be a dumb question but i've never lit for greenscreen. I've got a 12x greenscreen about 12 feet outside of a window that needs to be keyed out in post. Question is can I light the green with daylight lamps and light my interior to tungsten without it looking drastically mixed? All that really matters is controlling the daylight spill through the windows right? As long as the green is evenly lit, regardless of color temp, I should be able to light my interior completely separate.

My thinking is that color temp on green is irrelevant since it is just going to be green in the end. As long as it isn't bouncing back or spilling into the interior it shouldn't matter. Am I totally thinking about this wrong?

Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all!
 
That's right color temp on green is irrelevant. It just needs to be really GREEN. Keep foreground lighting from spilling on green screen too. Separation is important so keep the foreground as far as possible from the greenscreen.
 
Yes color temp is the least important thing when lighting the screen. More important are evenness, and exposure. With every digital camera (or film emulsion for that matter) there is a sweet spot somewhere near the middle of the exposure range where you're maximizing saturation-- any brighter and the colors would start to go white-ish, and darker and they'd go black-ish. It's a safe bet to expose the screen as if it were a grey card (50% IRE), although depending on the camera the sweet spot might be a stop over or under there... but it'll be pretty close so exposing for middle-grey should do the trick just fine.

As long as you have a properly green screen, and as long as you're lighting it with reasonably full-spectrum lighting, it shouldn't much matter what the color temp is.
 
I will say that I believe now that daylight is better for lighting these screens than 3200K. Although people do it everyday, its just a feeling I have that the green comes out a truer green this way and I'm not talking about a CRI problem but rather just that a purer white light may be better. What Kevin said about exposure is really right though. Hot and dark spots (especially combined with wrinkles) make it tough to get a clean key.
 
I've used cheep flourescents from Home Depot that work great. Play around with different shutter speeds and try to get your talent as far away from the screen as possible. Typically you light the screen first and then the talent.

Good Luck.
 
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