Michael Carter
Veteran
Had some interesting red-screen experience lately, thought I'd share - as there is virtually no info out there...
This was a PSA for the big electric conglomerate, for summer use - "save power from four til seven", as in "Texas gets hotter every year and the power outages are getting ridiculous..."
Anyway, I had shot a "music video" for Band of Puppets... basically some cool dudes who are crazy for muppet-style puppeteering, and have been doing kid's videos using local bands & musicians. Much much cooler than "Barney"... Oncor Energy saw it and inquired about a PSA spot.
I had some drinks with with the puppet creators and we got into the idea of a cool composited look and came up with several shots. Having shot the furry creatures already (on-set, not keyed) I knew some of the main characters were neon-green and sky blue, and very fuzzy... I told them we'd need to do a magenta screen test.
First thing I discovered... nobody sells chromakey-magenta fabric - at least hours of googling turned up absolutely nothing. After more searching, I found some fuschia party tablecloths and some bright magenta fabrics to test.
And this is certainly a deal you want to do extensive testing. I shot the fabric samples under daylight (flos & HIDs) and checked for lighting and fabric that would give me the purest RGB readout possible - the goal being R255, G0, B0 - my belief is that the less color on separate channels, the better. Settled on the fuschia tablecloth with 1/2 minus green on biax flos. I also tested rim/backlighting from daylight to full tungsten.
I was shooting this with an HMC150 - not the best keying camera but a world away from the DSLRs, and I've done major keying projects with it (and I'm about to get an AC130...)
The tests looked promising; but in hindsight, I really wished I'd done some tests with different chroma levels. The saturation of the puppets was often so intense that the regions of overlap with the intense BG caused some problems in keying. My guess is turning the chroma down would have just made a more difficult key by adding G&B to the background, but I am still curious about that.
Keylight does not seem crazy about magenta plates. The "status" display for green will show you a lot of black; with red, it's all fairly grey. But having hours of HMC keys under my belt, I was able to work with these amazingly tough keys... hair, fuzz and fur. A despill bias layer with a non-spill track matte is really handy here.
So - it is very doable with non-hollywood gear, as some shots were just as tough as it gets to key. Here's the final - probably 80% on green, many mixed green & red comps as well. Very pleased with the overall style and feel, though I'm still noticing some rough edges. Client is beyond psyched.
This was a PSA for the big electric conglomerate, for summer use - "save power from four til seven", as in "Texas gets hotter every year and the power outages are getting ridiculous..."
Anyway, I had shot a "music video" for Band of Puppets... basically some cool dudes who are crazy for muppet-style puppeteering, and have been doing kid's videos using local bands & musicians. Much much cooler than "Barney"... Oncor Energy saw it and inquired about a PSA spot.
I had some drinks with with the puppet creators and we got into the idea of a cool composited look and came up with several shots. Having shot the furry creatures already (on-set, not keyed) I knew some of the main characters were neon-green and sky blue, and very fuzzy... I told them we'd need to do a magenta screen test.
First thing I discovered... nobody sells chromakey-magenta fabric - at least hours of googling turned up absolutely nothing. After more searching, I found some fuschia party tablecloths and some bright magenta fabrics to test.
And this is certainly a deal you want to do extensive testing. I shot the fabric samples under daylight (flos & HIDs) and checked for lighting and fabric that would give me the purest RGB readout possible - the goal being R255, G0, B0 - my belief is that the less color on separate channels, the better. Settled on the fuschia tablecloth with 1/2 minus green on biax flos. I also tested rim/backlighting from daylight to full tungsten.
I was shooting this with an HMC150 - not the best keying camera but a world away from the DSLRs, and I've done major keying projects with it (and I'm about to get an AC130...)
The tests looked promising; but in hindsight, I really wished I'd done some tests with different chroma levels. The saturation of the puppets was often so intense that the regions of overlap with the intense BG caused some problems in keying. My guess is turning the chroma down would have just made a more difficult key by adding G&B to the background, but I am still curious about that.
Keylight does not seem crazy about magenta plates. The "status" display for green will show you a lot of black; with red, it's all fairly grey. But having hours of HMC keys under my belt, I was able to work with these amazingly tough keys... hair, fuzz and fur. A despill bias layer with a non-spill track matte is really handy here.
So - it is very doable with non-hollywood gear, as some shots were just as tough as it gets to key. Here's the final - probably 80% on green, many mixed green & red comps as well. Very pleased with the overall style and feel, though I'm still noticing some rough edges. Client is beyond psyched.
