Green screen

thanks, Benny, for sharing some details … The community here at fcp.co is an aesome mixture of talent&skills, I learn new very day.

I once needed a mobile solution, and stumbled upon one of those:




You can tell ahunded times your subjects "Don't wear green!"; they do.One lady once told me "This isn't green, this is fir!" ... ahhhh, yes, I should have kown that.-

These pop-up thingies come in two colors, just a turn and you have a blue screen.
HINT: to fold it back to its pocket needs at last a 7th Dan in Origami!! You have to watch a video 10times, to understand, how its done.

concerning your interviews:
before creating a MultiCam (cam1,cam2, audio), compound each angle with its corresponding background - when you switch angle, you instantly have the correct 'angle' for that. …in case, you have a 'real' bg, no abstract grpahics or so...

A very smart plan doing it that way! For interviewees who can not come to you, you can offer the studio comee to them - and you still have the same 'look' (if lighting does some magic) .

Benny
If I might add a few of suggestions…

Make sure to instruct your talent (interviewees/host) not to wear any green at all. Nothing is more fun than having someone show up on set wearing a green shirt/jacket etc… to ruin your day. Gotta love the floating head. Really they won't know better.
Dark clothing is better, white and very light makes spill worse. Same goes for furniture. No chrome, shiny metal, white surfaces, if you can avoid it.

If you can, shoot some footage beforehand and try editing. During the trial shoot, go for your best set up and a worst case set up so you can play with fixing issues in post. Great to practice on a clip that is not part of final vid. No fears to get it right and lessons learned are for a lifetime.

Make sure to white balance both cameras prior to shoot.
Careful lighting will make the experience easy.

Have fun!

Hope this helps, Greg

Great pink Vespa you have there Greg

Thank you for the tips.

We've planned a test shoot and edit before the real shoot.

We use a 12'x24' cloth green screen a lot, and never iron it. Much easier and more reliable is to use clamps on the backdrop holder pipes, to pull the cloth tight. Even the worst wrinkles disappear easily.

Another trick, move your camera as far from the subject as possible and zoom in, to help defocus the green screen, helping with lighting issues. Lighting properly is the single most important element of a good keying shot.

Put a back light on the back of the person, too. This can help separate them from the background green, plus helps kill off any green spill.

Finally, we use VeeScope Live to help us find and correct issue before we ever hit the record button.

I shoot green screen about once a month in my musty basement and I'm always blown away by how easy FCPX is with keying out the backgrounds. It's amazing software for that.

Hawaiki Keyer blows FCPX's keyer out of the water which is no mean feat. At $49 too, it's an absolute bargain.

damiangrady wrote: Hawaiki Keyer blows FCPX's keyer out of the water which is no mean feat. At $49 too, it's an absolute bargain.

I dunno about that. I saw people here talking about it and saw it was only $50. So I downloaded the trial and messed with it quite a bit. I could not achieve a better key on the stuff that I usually key than I can with FCPX's built-in keyer. But then again I have 5 lights all pointed at my green screen and we stay about 4 feet in front if it. Still I usually get a thin white line around the matte (usually where our shirts are) that I must get rid of and Hawaii didn't do any better in that regard no matter what I did. I'm assuming it's just the nature of Canon H.264 4:2:0 video.

I would not consider 4-5 feet nearly enough distance from the screen. We do more like 10-15. But that much space isn't always available in every situation. We're lucky enough to have that much space to work with.

Here's three good articles, each has a nice tip or two.
www.directorofphotographyblog.com/2010/1...-screen-11-top-tips/

www.premiumbeat.com/blog/tips-shooting-blue-green-screen/

www.videomaker.com/videonews/2013/11/5-green-screen-tips