HVX green screen bank commercial

Jim Arthurs

Jim Arthurs

Well-known member
Hi all, last Monday I shot a commercial for the Mechanics Bank in Northern California... all green screen setups on a soundstage. 720 24pn, delivered as a letterboxed SD product.

Because turn-around was very tight, I brought a Vegas box with After Effects on set, and was able to off-line a rough cut for the sound designer literally before the guys had wrapped out the lights and cables.

Here's the final after five days of motion tracking and CGI, along with the shoot-day rough cut to compare...

Final spot (approx. 12 megs)

http://ftp.datausa.com/imageshoppe/outgoing/MECH_BANK/MECH_BANK_sorenson.mov

Rough cut

http://ftp.datausa.com/imageshoppe/outgoing/MECH_BANK/MECH_BANK_rough_cut.mov

Please download and don't stream for the sake of my bandwidth...

Regards,

Jim Arthurs
 
Oh my god Jim that was awesome!!!
So the video was shot with HVX??
Wow, Pana needs to see this.
You should post this over at DVi as well.
Lets see a spot of this caliber shot with
the Canon or Sony HDV!
What were the backgrounds generated with?
The SOL never looked better!!
Thanks for posting.
 
EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE,
Looked like a national broadcast spot easily. What CC process was used if any also what settings in camera did you use to get the cleanest key and did you use Keylight in AE?
 
HVXguy said:
Oh my god Jim that was awesome!!!
So the video was shot with HVX??
Wow, Pana needs to see this.
You should post this over at DVi as well.
Lets see a spot of this caliber shot with
the Canon or Sony HDV!
What were the backgrounds generated with?
The SOL never looked better!!
Thanks for posting.
Click to expand...

Thanks Mike...yes, all HVX. It was fun to wear all the hats, and to give the camera a good run through. Rented matte box didn't fit, they sent the wrong follow focus, etc., but it was fun.

The client specifically didn't want any photo elements for the backgrounds, all CGI for a painterly feel... used Lightwave and Vue for the organic and nature elements. I wished I had another few days to add details, but then again, something to be said about getting in and out.

Vegas and Raylight for the edit and all post steps, Keylight and AE for the composite.

Regards,

Jim Arthurs
 
LighthouseMedia said:
EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE,
Looked like a national broadcast spot easily. What CC process was used if any also what settings in camera did you use to get the cleanest key and did you use Keylight in AE?
Click to expand...

Thanks Kendal!

Overall, not much color correction needed, except dealing with the loss of green when squashing green spill... in the Statue of Liberty shot, the ATM facade was a green/blue that needed special attention to keep the original color and still pull a matte.

One of the biggest decisions I had to make up front was this...

...Shoot DVCPRO 50 for the least compression and easiest key, OR shoot HD for more overall picture detail for re-framing the image and motion tracking? I sort of whimped out and did 720, and wish I had done 1080 for a bit more breathing room in the codec for keying. Overall, I think the HVX does better with blue screen (good blue screen, that is) than green screen, and that flies in the face of most digital camera history. The codec develops a nasty window screen effect on edges in soft transition material and this seems to be a bit more visible using green than blue, IMO. Again, more tests will reveal more results.

I used F5 with detail set to -3 and master ped to -2, normal matrix if I remember.

Regards,

Jim Arthurs
 
That looks great. Was wondering what the lighting setup was and if you used anything on the lens, filters, wide angle adapters etc...
 
Jim, that looks fantastic. Congrats!!

I'm curious about your experience with the HVX and Vegas. I tried Raylight when they were demoing their very first offering of the HVX conversion software and I wasn't getting very good results. For you to have a laptop on set and deliver a rough cut with Vegas instantly certainly means that some improvements have been made. If you have time, can you outline the process a bit for someone who may not know the steps (ie, the "red," "green," "blue" settings... can you just drag the files in, do they need to be converted for use like they do in FCP?) and what versions and hardware you have to have? I used Vegas almost exclusively when shooting on the DVX and just haven't been able to get into the FCP groove for the HVX no matter how I try. It's usable, certainly, but I never had a more personable, "it just does what I want it to do" experience like I did with Vegas. If I can easily start editing on that platform again, I'd be thrilled. Thanks!
 
Hi Haakon, thanks for the comments!

I had one of my $800.00 mini-tower render boxes on set, which was a 3.0 gig PentiumD with 2 gigs of ram I built up last August. At the moment I don't have a laptop, but will be evaluating them soon. Maybe the new Power Book will cover all bases, both XP and Mac.

Like you, I'm resistant to FCP. I wanted to stay with Vegas, and I think Raylight works reasonably well. I'm pleased with the quality of conversion, at least, and I'm sure it will only get faster.

Here were the steps, keep in mind I was using just one 4gig card, but that was hardly a limitation on a stage with a limited number of setups.

-We shot until the client was happy, then I ran the camera over to the computer and USB'ed the P2 contents into a folder. I then immediately pushed a backup out to my little USB external drive.

-Copy the Raylight file into the video directory in the folder and double click. A couple minutes later you have a bunch of AVI's. I shot 720 24pn for everything in this case.

-On my machine "green" will playback with the window media player at 50% size at full speed. In Vegas, "green" will give you 23.976 playback with the preview set to "preview" and "auto". Of course when I rendered out a file of the rough cut, I switched to "blue", and the same when previewing the key quality in After Effects.

Raylight or CineForm ConnectHD for Vegas? They both have good points. At least try the demosn of each. ConnectHD renders a completely stand alone AVI file that will always playback at 100% speed. The file is a bit smaller than the native DVCPRO 100 original, to boot. Also, you can shoot 1080 and automatically resize to a full raster 1280 by 720, and I think we both agree that's really all the true rez the HVX produces in the first place. In addition, I think it has an automatic "flip" feature for lens adaptors.

The downside is that ConnectHD renders about 33% slower in Vegas than Raylight, and I just didn't want to trust the additional codec conversions when doing keying...

Just some random thoughts on the process...

Jim Arthurs
 
Wow. That was AWESOME. I've been wondering about greenscreen and HVX. I know people are doing it, like Curugon. But, I'm still waiting to see his results on the DVD.

NICE.

One thing I never understand about greenscreen work is how you remove all of that other stuff that's not the actual greenscreen.

I think I just got it: The actual greenscreen is for the person, everything else can be wiped/keyed/cleaned out. Am I wrong?

How did you do the weightless card?
 
Wow, thanks guys... but there's lots of good green screen working with the HVX going on, like Anders music video, The Ore project, anything I've missed in the last week or so, etc...

Donald, just a doorway dolly about 36" high to camera head... no restrictions on pan/tilt or movement, thanks to the miracle of tracking software.

Khoi, good question, as that was asked by one of the clients from the agency almost word for word... just a garbage matte is all that is needed to keep those things out of the key area.

I learned about the client's idea for the weightless card about five minutes before we shot it, as the moon guy was getting his helmet on. I just scanned the card and made a model in Lightwave for it, then timed it to the action of his hand. Throwing the background out of focus at the beginning of the shot helps spot light it a bit and gives the illusion of less DOF.

Thanks again, all...

Jim Arthurs
 
Jim Arthurs said:
Wow, thanks guys... but there's lots of good green screen working with the HVX going on, like Anders music video, The Ore project, anything I've missed in the last week or so, etc...

Donald, just a doorway dolly about 36" high to camera head... no restrictions on pan/tilt or movement, thanks to the miracle of tracking software.

Khoi, good question, as that was asked by one of the clients from the agency almost word for word... just a garbage matte is all that is needed to keep those things out of the key area.

I learned about the client's idea for the weightless card about five minutes before we shot it, as the moon guy was getting his helmet on. I just scanned the card and made a model in Lightwave for it, then timed it to the action of his hand. Throwing the background out of focus at the beginning of the shot helps spot light it a bit and gives the illusion of less DOF.

Thanks again, all...

Jim Arthurs
Click to expand...

Sweeet. I am going to be going into an all greenscreen production on my next project (or one of) and I need to learn these kinds of things.

Thanks for the quick insight.
 
Would never have thought it was possible to get such results from a $5000 dollar camera...Bravo, Jim. Thats the best commercial I've seen shot with the HVX 200. The client was smart to go with the "painterly" look and you really pulled it off exquisitely.
Peace, Norman
 
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