How to setup my 7D for a Green Screen Music Video Project?

E

etrust

Well-known member
Hi,

I have next week a green screen shooting at the studio and would like to know which settings (Lens, F-Stop, 1080p or 720p, Shutterspeed, etc..) you would suggest:

Equipments:

- 7D
- 17-55mm 2.8 canon
- 50mm 1.4 Nikon
- 30mm 1.4 Sigma

Situation:
- The Band will play the instruments like guitar, bass and drum and vocal

1) Shooting One: Close Ups

2) Shooting Two: Band

Which equipments and camera settings would you suggest?
I think that the drumer could be a dificult shot.


Thank you.
 
be careful with the drummer, drums are shiny and the sticks move very quickly and are very thin. Thus when they are shot the just disappear. If possible shoot at a higher shutter speed. I know this is a bit of a taboo for a lot of guys but if you leave it at a 50th you will have flailing hands with no sticks after the keying is done.
 
I did a music video with a T2i; (and said "never again" and use the HMC150 for that sort of thing now) - my experience:

With lots of motion, go with a high shutter speed;
Sharpness all the way down - the Canon aliasing will give you some hard, white lines.
Don't crank saturation all the way down, you want to catch a lot of green. Desaturate when it's all put together.
Shoot with some decent DOF vs. 1.8. Focus is pretty critical.
But if you have limited lighting, open up. Murky footage is very tough to key.
Use daylight white balance (use biax flos, high-wattage flo bulbs in china balls, or gel your tungsten).
Use more fill than usual to open shadows a bit, crush 'em back in post after keying - you'll get less noise (and see "murky footage" comment above).
Get Mark Christensen's After Effects book and study his keylight methodology; it's very useful, especially for killing the noise keylight adds.
Don't even try to key 720 footage. Nightmare.

In post, experiment with small amounts of screen shrink and screen softness; for starters, set your softness at about half the value of your shrink. Plan on using multiple passes and holdout masks.

DSLR footage is much less forgiving of uneven screen lighting. Use plenty of soft light, light evenly, have good distance between screen and subject, use some backlighting, etc.

Stretch the screen TIGHT. Then get a garment steamer and smooth it out. This is the #1 time saver after even lighting.

You can use Savage seamless in Chromakey green ($50 a roll, 9' wide) but it's not as saturated as even the cheapest eBay fabric screen, and seems to need more light.

If at all possible, bring good quality prints of the backgrounds/environments you'll place the footage over to the shoot. Motivate your lighting to fit. Upload JPEGS to your local photo-finisher (even a cheap drugstore - I use CVS). Deep, glossy photo-prints are often better than cheap inkjets. It's REALLY nice to have a bunch of 8x10's tacked to the studio wall.

The number one piece of advice I can give you is TEST TEST TEST before you do a major shoot. test with the same lights/etc you'll shoot with.

T2i shots:
grab3.jpg

grab2.jpg
 
Last edited:
"1080p" is uprez720p-ish give or take. NEVER ever use 720p on these cameras for chroma.

Clean surface & evenly lit GS is more important on a DSLR than your old semi-pro HD cameras. And again, be careful with DoF on these huge sensors (even though, in my experience, modern plugins are powerful enough to key nicely even with bokeh).
 
Last edited:
Michael Carter said:
I did a music video with a T2i; (and said "never again" and use the HMC150 for that sort of thing now) - my experience:

Use daylight white balance (use biax flos, high-wattage flo bulbs in china balls, or gel your tungsten).
Click to expand...

Is this because the chips are daylight balanced?
 
Man, I wish I had all these great tips when I shot my band's music video (T2i, greenscreen, windowless basement). I finished toying with the footage yesterday & I'll be posting it on youtube tomorrow. A big enough studio is the first thing I really missed, followed by big enough greenscreen, green carpeting and again SPACE..

All of these were pretty much out of my control, but I didn't fall behind and made some specific mistakes of my own - 720p, 1/60 - yea, I had no idea what I was working towards, so I wanted to be ready for the hypothetical slowmo.

to sum it up: keying hihats/cymbals/crashes was a bit of a nightmare (the dulling spray sounds awesome!) but the biggest nightmare was masking out those ugly brownish walls when someone was overlapping my tiny greenscreen.. I ended up having to use a lot of "candy" to save some of the shots (artificial lens flares, namely:)

oh and also, not only are fog machines a bad idea in an unventilated basement, they don't help the key, either :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)

EDIT: and here's the video:

 
Last edited:
Yes - it seems tungsten balance shots are amping up specific channels, thus more noise.

And the issue with keying 720 footage - test it and see. There is a tremendous amount of noise and aliasing in 720, and it has tons of dancing green in it. It can look gorgeous as a "plain everyday" shot, but throw an keyer on it and DAMN.... really very crazy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top