IT presentaion blue screen demo test run

Carrington Benz

Carrington Benz

Well-known member
Hi All,

Im back on the corp IT presentation again - this time I attempted to use a blue screen with basic 3 point setup.
It was my 1st ever blue screen experience - not sure if it will key out properly in fcp - what do you guy's think - is this ok - or awful?
The client just want a perfect white background & we only had 1 day & a very crumpled sheet of broadcast blue material to hang over a polecat.
Any suggestions for keying out here would be greatly appreciated.
Shot on normal scene flou - 50i ?? - Im dv pal.


Click here for the sample
http://homepage.mac.com/acen/andyvol2.mov
 
Re: IT presentaion blue screen demo test run

I think you might have a problem here. If you notice, the suit that he is wearing picked up a lot of blue light, not to mention the blue pin stripes that were almost the same colors as your background. YOu will definatly be having a lot of work to do, in trying to key this out properly. A better way to get an all white background is to get a white wall, or as close to it as possible. Light the wall much more than your talent. Then turn on your zebras and make sure that you overexpose enough so that as much of that white wall is all zebras. If you can do the shoot again, that would probably give you much better results than trying to key from the footage that you have.
 
Re: IT presentaion blue screen demo test run

You won't get that to key in FCP. Way too much variation in the background with the wrinkles and all and the foreground has a bluish tint.

Maybe in keylight or primatte or something, but I might recommend rotoscoping the whole thing....
 
Re: IT presentaion blue screen demo test run

I was bored and decided to try keying this in Keylight. Not too hard, actually.


I got a little translucency on the sleave I couldn't easily get rid of, but I'm sure if I drew masks around the subject before keying and messed around with the matte choker, this would not be too much of a problem.

My advice is this: don't key in FCP. The chrome key software is terrible and will provide you with horrible results in this case unless you are very talented or very lucky.

I use AE 6 pro and Keylight, which works great for almost everything. When I used it set to defeault settings, the suit was about 50% transparent, but by fooling around with some settings and messing with the matte choker, I easily fixed this. I was able to get the body perfect but the head with a weird halo, or everything perfect except the translucent sleave...using some masks and a little creativity, I'm sure you could get very acceptable results from this footage, but within Final Cut Pro, I doubt it.

Lastly, I'd color correct what you've shot when composited against the white background because it will have a strange tint to it from all the keying and everything.
 
Re: IT presentaion blue screen demo test run

Hey Policar - any chance I could check out your attempts somehow ?
I haven't used keylight - do you really think its possible to get away with this without a reshoot - I hope so
 
Re: IT presentaion blue screen demo test run

OK.. lets see i think I would have used a green screen with that suite...
I used an older version of ultimatte 2.xx and it keyed sorta
i played with the settings a bit to get it this good but there still a lot of jagged edges especially when its moving. it could probibly be done better with some more tweaking.. also i masked out most of the area. not being used.

535_Comp_1_1_00149.jpg


its low res but you can see the jaggies... tough key a darker background would be best maybe...
 
Re: IT presentaion blue screen demo test run

I rendered out a quick movie of my prelimary attempt to key the footage. Don't expect any miracles; it's hard footage to key, and I didn't put much time into working with it. There are weird halos around the hands and head, there's no more blue in the suit, and the outside is very crawly. All of this can be fixed to some extent but it gets time consuming. Also, since the footage you uploaded was frame blended and compressed pretty heavily, it didn't key as well as the original footage would.

http://home.comcast.net/~pfhorwitz/bluscreen.mov

I'm convinced that with a little work you could salvage all your footage. The above is very rough and could be refined much much further.
 
Re: IT presentaion blue screen demo test run

Yes, very true about the darker background.  It could look very good with a darker background.

Also, you'll notice when he moves his hand (in the clip I uploaded) there's a serious halo.  This could be masked and eliminated, but with a darker background (preferably with a bluish tint) it would be nearly invisible.

Another bit of advice regarding the background is using a slow moving, bluish/black pattern, perhaps created with fractal noise in after effects, then blurred.  This makes the jaggies less noticeable, and still gives a cool look which is much cleaner and more professional looking than using a real life background would be. Of course, you would have to change the background slightly whenever the camera changed angles or it would look weird, but just scaling it up or down to match would definitely suffice.  A lot of companies do this and you can see it on tv sometimes.
 
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