where I can find tutorials for building a miniature green screen set???

N

Nicholas Natteau

Veteran
I just purchased some WWII action figures. And I want to build a miniature green screen setup. Can anyone tell me where I might find some tutorials on miniature green screen sets. I already googled and looked up on vimeo and youtube, but didn't find much.

Any suggestions or leads will help. Thanks very much in advance.
 
Shooting greenscreen with miniatures is exactly the same as shooting with actors. The one advantage you have is that you don't need a giant greenscreen - cheap collapsible circular screens of around 1.5 metres wide are easy to find and perfectly adequate. Other than that, it's all the same issues as with actors - separately lighting your greenscreen background, avoiding light spill from the background etc. Although if those WWII action figures are wearing greenish uniforns, also make sure you can get a decent key separation from the footage. As with any greenscreening, do some test shooting and key extraction before shooting 'for real'.
 
use green acrylic colorant usually used for mixing with white paint. Simply use it pure, with a small foam roller on big grey carton sheet .
set the screen as far as you can in the background, so you avoid shadows. light it with a fluo tube (a daylight type, around 4500K, that will enhance green).
Green could be not so great in all occasion, so you should also get a blue, black, white and red one. For these, you can find colored thick paper.
 
Aren't army men green? Use blue screen. As I understand it any primary colour can be keyed, but red isn't useful due to skin tones.
 
Egg, he's got miniatures... so probably skin color isn't a factor.
None the less, most any primary color will work... just the standard is green or blue as they dont effect the "skin" tons as much.
Poster board, store bought, and pre-colored will work fine for your "miniature" needs.
Other then that, lighting will become an important factor in creating a proper "green" screen effect. Remember, you need to evenly light the subject (no shadows in the background), but also try to match the scene's lighting you want to use in the background... i.e. outside evening sun, or mid day desert sun, city lights, etc...
 
The problem with using blue or yellow in place of green is that green contains both of those colors. If there's no skin tones, use a red screen. I used red with a spaceship composite and it works great!
 
The #1 consideration in choosing colors to key (as far as I understand it and have experienced first hand): The sum total of the color - the color you end up with in your keying software based on the surface, lights, shifts caused by your camera and transcoding, etc - should be as close to one of the RGB colors as possible. So optimal green, eyedroppered in your software, would read R:0 G:255 B:0.

This will give you the easiest key since the software only needs to work with one channel. And it's not rocket science getting close to these numbers; you simply have to do a few tests. Shoot, ingest, check the color, adjust lights, exposure, white balance, etc. Make notes.

I'm doing a complex keying shoot involving (essentially) muppets. Lots of soft fuzzy hair edges that have to hold. Several of the characters are neon green and turquoise. However, magenta screens are not widely available like blue and green screens (not available at all as far as I've found...) I found a fuschia party table cloth - lighting it with flos with 1/2 minus green has tested very well. We tested every major character on both colors

Surpise - the dark blue guy looked better on green than on fuschia - way, way better. My experiences with stuff like blue jeans on green screen has added masks and roto to pulling keys, so... surprise. TEST TEST TEST!!!! You will learn tons of stuff, find good and bad surprises, and get more and more "second nature" with gear and processes!

Did I mention... TEST TEST TEST?!??!
 
David W. Richardson said:
The problem with using blue or yellow in place of green is that green contains both of those colors.
Click to expand...

Cameras' primaries are Red, Green, and Blue.

Since it is the camera that needs to provide the distinguishing colors, Red, Green, and Blue are the relevant primaries for keying.


You seem to be thinking like a painter -- colors work differently on digital devices than they do when mixing paints.
 
fde101 said:
Cameras' primaries are Red, Green, and Blue.

Since it is the camera that needs to provide the distinguishing colors, Red, Green, and Blue are the relevant primaries for keying.


You seem to be thinking like a painter -- colors work differently on digital devices than they do when mixing paints.
Click to expand...

Actually, I'm a photographer. So light is my medium. I understand the difference in the way colors work between pigments and light. In pigment, the absence of all color is white, and the presence of all color is black. In light, the opposite it true -- the absence of all color is black, the presence of all color is white.

All that being said, my practical experience with compositing has shown that in less-than-perfect greenscreen lighting conditions, it's necessary to use some latitude in green colors in order to get the composite. And when we start using a wider range of green shade in the compositing, then the existence of blue and yellow in the elements we don't want to turn transparent becomes more important.
 
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