Denver Video Production

The most important thing in Green Screen/Chroma Keying is lighting the subject and backdrop.  A professor told me in grad school that the best lighting for green screen was outside on a cloudy day. Next time it’s an overcast day, take a look at the ground and notice that there’s no shadow. This is because the clouds bounce the light all around in every direction and therefore cancel any concentrated focal points  which create shadows. That’s the objective in lighting a green screen set. Even lighting from from all directions to cancel out shadows.

Once your subject is well lit, it’s time to shoot. I shoot in HD for all green screen shoots because it gives me a larger range of colors and more pixels/data to work with. Standard NTSC will work, but if you have the ability to shoot at 1080, I would recommend it. Another tip, if your tripod has that gear, is to flip your camera on it’s side to utilize the 16:9 ratio. Fill the subject on the 16 side, instead of the 9. More data means more to work with and thus more options in post.

If you’re subject is well lit, mic’d, then shoot away. Given the well lit footage, post is simple to key out the green in FCP. Kenstone has some good articles (oldies but goodies) if you’re unfamiliar with the process.

Now that the green is pulled from the footage, you can simply lay a backdrop behind the subject layer.

I tend to spend a lot of time in photoshop during post-production creating png layers to import into final cut. Final Cut provides limitless options when paired with Photoshop. This marriage is what makes this technology so much fun.

I don’t know the actual stats on how many videos are uploaded to youtube each day, but I would imagine it’s in the hundreds of thousands. Unfortunately, most of them suck. I’m not talking about content, but compression. Our internet is getting littered with really poor quality videos. I did a little googling and found a few articles by the master Brian Gary on the Kenstone.net site. He’s put plenty of time and troubleshooting into finding a pretty amazing equation for compressing videos before they are run through the youtube upload-compressor and still maintain high quality. For anyone uploading video (pro or not) these articles are a no-brainer.

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Westword just sent me a link of a Blog that they started for the crack dancing videos I made.

My buddy Dan Knudson and I perfected our Green Screen technique today in his studio. We’re using the HVX200 and some really pro lighting. Dan and I are really excited about this technology. Granted it’s been around for 50 years, but nowadays, with videos for the web, Green screen production is in high demand. The partnership (along with Dan’s dog) proves to be a pretty great team. I don’t know if there’s anyone in Denver that has this as dialed in as we do.

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