Greenscreen

[stephensavage1986]

Hi All,

 

I'm looking into green screen technologies for our small 11-19 Special School. Does anyone have any experience with this or can recommend any products?

 

Thanks

 

Stephen

[NotSoFast]

Paint a wall?

[stephensavage1986]

Paint a wall?

 

Thanks for your in depth response - would you be able to expand on it? Any recommendations for software? Have you used any cameras you know to be good for this tech?

 

Thanks

 

Stephen

[markwilfan]

We use a canon legeria as it has an input for a mic, so we use some wireless mics hooked into a mixing desk for audio and feed that back into the camera. Makes a massive difference in audio quality. We have a cheaply green cloth on a frame with a couple of lamps to give a semi even spread of light.

 

We use adobe premiere elements to chroma key the green out, fairlky easy to use and does the job

[dhicks]

I'm looking into green screen technologies for our small 11-19 Special School.

 

As pointed out above, the main issue with doing green screen always seems to be getting the background as evenly lit as possible so you get a consistant shade of green recorded by the camera. If you have a space somewhere in the school, a permanant setup with a section of wall painted green (or pretty much any other colour, actually) and fixed ceiling lights might be best. It needn't actually take up that much space, you just need a section of wall that's not doing much else, and you can always put a curtain or something in front to hide it when not in use.

 

If you want a portable setup, there's several available on eBay for around £100. You can get a kit with a couple of stands and a background-and-floor length backdrop that people stand on - that might wind up getting tatty quite quickly, depending on usage. I've always thought the "jigsaw"-style martial arts mats might do rather well for a floor covering - pretty much the same shade of green, and you can have children roll around on them a bit more.

 

You can also get chromakey backdrops on eBay that have reflective beads in the backdrop, designed to change to whatever colour you light them with and provide a very evenly-lit backdrop.

[spadam]

We did quite a bit of playing around with this a few years ago using Premiere Pro.. As has been said the key is to evenly light the background and avoid throwing shadows onto it from your actors. We didn't have much budget for custom lighting but found that we got the best results by filming outside on a slightly overcast summers day (avoid direct sunlight).

 

For a screen we were actually donated a pop-up green screen backdrop by our school photographer which was quite useful but only measured about 3x2m so didn't allow for much movement whilst filming..

[Reverend_Dan]

We have a pop up green one which was donated from someone, it works ok with the tricaster but as others said, lighting is the key. Things can be fixed in premier to a point.

I have seen a demo of the grey screens with the LED ring light that to the lens of the camera and they worked really well

[laserblazer]

There are any number of good tutorials on Youtube. I'd start there. As others have said, getting the lighting correct is over half the battle. I use Premier Pro CS4 but there a a few sub £100 packages that will chroma key. Make sure your school uniform isn't green

[NotSoFast]

Serif Videoplus worked for me with a painted wall and a Flip camera, but that's obviously not going to get you professional results. Our uniform is green, but the wall was blue. :-)

[brewerd]

Check out this thread here

 

There are bits of information in there about software and cameras, could be useful.

[rdk]

We've painted a wall green with special chromakey paint that was quite expensive (3-4 times the cost of normal paint). Camera's don't seem to matter (we've used from phones to semi-pro cameras), and all editing is in iMovie that works fine to remove the green background.

[WebBot]

We painted a room in Dublin Bay Green 3 from B&Q. Some low heat lights from NewLand Media and use an Edirol LVS400 to do the keying. To get a PC background, we use an Canopus TwinPact which converts VGA to S-Video. And to capture the analogue signal into a PC we use an Canopus ADVC-100.

The process is all SD and we use an SD camcorder's analogue output. The Studio was put in 5 years ago and still works well. Because it's all hardware, there's no software updates to worry about and we use both Premiere Pro and MovieMaker to do the capturing. While it's not HD, to be honest the work from the students isn't broadcast quality either. This way we are able to churn out video clips really, really quickly that are good quality - just not broadcast quality.

 

Breckdown:

• Lights: £800
  
• Edirol: £700
  
• Canopus Twinpact: £300
  
• Canopus ADVC100: £150
  
• Camcorder: £300
  
• Paint: £50
  

 

Compared to the lovely NewTek Tricaster (£8000) it was an absolute bargain. PM me if you want a visit (Northumberland)