Ideal Blue/Greenscreen setting

A

AMonthOfSundays

Member
So far I'm still a go for purchasing the HVX when or around its release. Something that my films have and will continue to have is a good amount of green screen compositing. I’ve always got decent keys but I’m sure ill be able to get a lot better results with the HVX. Id like to get some opinions of what the best mode to shoot in would be, that would have the best color capturing to get the best key.
 
Well, the best we can do is to make educated guesses until some actual footage shows up, but here's my take; (Note that I'm assuming you're very proficient with lighting and setting up a greenscreen stage and there's nothing to fault on the production aspect of your work...)

First, there will be inherent limitations with the camera's lens. This lens is designed to be all things to all people. All the glass elements in zoom lenses tend to bounce the green or blue spill around inside the lens, contribution to a level of overall image contamination. I'm NOT faulting Panasonic here, but unless a zoom is very, very good (i.e. very expensive) it will never be as clean for greenscreen as a prime lens will be. In addition, the lens will more than likely have some chromatic abberation (though hopefully not nearly as bad as the Sony Z1 has! Yuck!!).

Beyond the lens, and the influence of the image control settings (sharpness, etc.), there's the recording format to define the quality of your key;

In the SD world, DVCpro50 will give you great keys, similar to digibeta. It's 4:2:2 color, with very light compression on the image. Even if you shoot all your other footage in DV, make sure to do your foreground plates in DVCpro50.

In HD, all things being equal, the 1080 24p setting should give you the most pixels and the most color to work with, that is assuming that the chips allow the full 1240 by 1080 resolution that the codec is capable of.

Even if your non-bluescreen material is 720p, shooting your green screen plates in 1080p should give a better result because of the scale down of the footage.

Finally, if you have access to an HD NLE, and your shooting on a stage, consider recording off of the live component outs of the camera to by-pass all issues of compression. The color space more than likely will still be 4:2:2, but you won't have compression artifacts messing up your edges and details.

Regards,

Jim Arthurs
 
Also, having said all that I did, I don't want to diminish the hope that the HVX should be the BEST plamcorder on the market for greenscreen/bluescreen in its off the shelf configuration.

Far superior to HDV for this sort of work.

Regards,

Jim Arthurs
 
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