Lighting suggestions needed.

Only you can decide if it's OK for your needs. It would not be at the top of my list, but you know your budget better than anyone else. Do realize that the total wattage is really 465 watts rather than the 1600 watts listed. It really bothers me when companies do this.

Something else to think about, is in my little world, I light the green screen separately from the talent.
 
David W. Jones said:
Only you can decide if it's OK for your needs. It would not be at the top of my list, but you know your budget better than anyone else. Do realize that the total wattage is really 465 watts rather than the 1600 watts listed. It really bothers me when companies do this.

Something else to think about, is in my little world, I light the green screen separately from the talent.
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Damn, good catch.
You have any suggestions? Like what companies to watch for ?
 
If it were me, I would start by getting a couple of Kino Flo Diva clones. There are quite a few Biax Fluorescent lights out there in 55w x2 or 55w x4 that are very reasonable in price. I would then load them with Kino Flo 55C-K5X Biax tubes and use them to light the green screen. I would then flag off any spill that might hit your talent. Once you have your green screen lit you are free to light your talent as you see fit.

As far as green screens go, I have a couple of foam backed screens from these guys that have been great..... http://www.chroma-key.com/cat--Foam-Backed-Green-Screen--FOAM+GREEN+SCREEN.html
 
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I did some work for a company that had me use these exact lights and green screen. They can do a pretty nice job and get a decent soft quality. That being said, they're a huge pain to put together. The rods holding the soft box together are made of cheap wood and can easily be damaged, making the softbox unusable. And they're really not great for transportation. So if you're going to just set them up and keep them at the same place, they can be okay. But if you need to transport them, they're really not the best. The bulbs can be finicky as well.

They are cheap, but they're really not something you would want to use long term on a professional level. So it really depends on your level of clientel and what you hope to get out of them. If you want a short term, easy solution, then they can be fine. But if you're wanting to invest in some professional quality lights, you should look elsewhere, granted anything worth getting will likely be SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive.

As far as the green screen goes, it's really not too bad. Unlike some better ones out there, it wrinkles easily. The case that comes with it is way too small to fit it back in. And it's really not that big. Just big enough for someone to stand still in and key them out. If you need them to move much, it's probably too small.
 
I clicked on this thread because I thought you needed suggestions on lightning, not lighting. I was hoping for some good talk of weather vs post effects.
 
In highschool I used to make chromakey "movies" with a bluescreen paper backdrop, digital 8 camera, and a single 400watt tungsten lamp that was meant to be used on top of a 8mm movie camera. My friends loved my videos and nobody complained about quality.
 
egproductions said:
In highschool I used to make chromakey "movies" with a bluescreen paper backdrop, digital 8 camera, and a single 400watt tungsten lamp that was meant to be used on top of a 8mm movie camera. My friends loved my videos and nobody complained about quality.
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How's that working for you these days? Looking great in 1080? Let's have a tutorial!
 
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David W. Jones said:
If it were me, I would start by getting a couple of Kino Flo Diva clones. There are quite a few Biax Fluorescent lights out there in 55w x2 or 55w x4 that are very reasonable in price. I would then load them with Kino Flo 55C-K5X Biax tubes and use them to light the green screen. I would then flag off any spill that might hit your talent. Once you have your green screen lit you are free to light your talent as you see fit.

As far as green screens go, I have a couple of foam backed screens from these guys that have been great..... http://www.chroma-key.com/cat--Foam-Backed-Green-Screen--FOAM+GREEN+SCREEN.html
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What he said.

I've done a ton of broadcast green screen, and you can't beat the biax for cost and efficiency. I generally use a dual on each side and sort of arc diffusion across the barn doors. If the screen is wide, I'll ceiling mount another dual or use one of my sorta DIY big-spiral-tube fixtures. You need a decent amount of space to separate the talent from the background and have room to light smoothly. And I've found a perfectly-flat-lit screen isn't as important as a perfectly flat screen (especially with AE's current set of keying tools), so if you use fabric, buy a garment steamer - the stand-up kind are on Amazon for under $100. Wrinkles in the screen are a giant pain. I'd much rather have a painted wall though. I took a scrap of green screen to the paint store and they mixed a gallon that works great.

I've had terrible luck with the popup screens - not nearly saturated enough.

It comes down to how good you want your key to be. Creative Cow just featured a tutorial article on their email newsletter about green screen techniques. I watched the video - it was some kid and his hair looked like a pile of crawling ants fighting over a bristle brush. (How the hell this got to be a distributed how-to video is beyond me, it just looked like ass!) There are tons of tutorials out there that are about the same level of quality. If you want the best key possible, shoot it 4K (or BMC 2k prores) and do all the best-practices stuff you can find on lighting. Pixels make a massive difference, I think often more than higher bit depths. There's a comparison on YouTube between the BMC raw and prores vs. the GH4 at 4k (and this was made before the NX1 gave the GH4 a thumping). Eye-opener.
 
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