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Blue Screen shooting with Panasonic AG-DVX100.
Hi all,
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9 Replies
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It’s actually not too tricky- but you need to do a few very key things.
One- first and foremost you *must* light your green or bluescreen perfectly. Find someone with extensive on-set experience. By spending a few extra dollars on someone with experience you’ll literally save yourself massive amounts of time and money in post.
Two- shoot 24pA and work in 23.98. This will give you true progressive material which composites much better in post than interlaced. The last thing you want to work with is 24p material at 29.97- meaning the interlacing is intact. That will make a very difficult composite. So- shoot in 24pA, post in 23.98. If you’re working in PAL- this means 25p. Also if this is not for a PAL country I highly recommend sticking with NTSC. PAL gains not nearly enough resolution to make the later quality lose of a transcode worth the effort.
Three- get a good keying program. FCP alone won’t cut it. Definitely Shake, After Effects, Ultimatte, DVGarage.
Four- upsample the chroma in your footage. I did an all greenscreen shot with the DVX100 and this made a huge difference in the quality of my comps. I used Graeme Nattress’ G-Nicer plugin:
https://www.nattress.com/Products/filmeffects/G_Nicer411.htm
Hope that helps. Keying in post can be easy if you set it up right. Or it can be the single most frustrating and ultimately costly and defeating aspect of making a film. Above all, if any one shot can be taken without a comp- do it.
-Noah
Get the most out of your DVX100 and FCP with Noah’s DVD:
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Hi, I forgot one question: when lighting the greenscreen, how may stops should be darker or lighter in relationship with the FG Actor?
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Disregard everything I said about 24p because it does not apply to PAL. You’ll shoot 25p and edit 25p. All your work in Shake, etc will be at 25fps progressive.
Again- highly, highly, highly recommend getting a DP or consultant with greenscreen experience. If you’re asking those kinds of basic questions about lighting a greenscreen you’re likely heading into a disastrously long and expensive post-production. Shooting greenscreen correctly is probably the single most difficult aspect of cinematography, especially when working with DV.
Seriously, do this on your own as a first time out with no experience and you’ll be kicking yourself every day in post for not getting it right in production. You’ll be going frame by frame over every shot forever just to get comps to look decent- forget good- just acceptably ‘not bad’. If you spend the time to ask around now you might even get someone to do it for free. Heck if I lived in your area I would help you just to save you the pain. Am I being clear enough? 🙂
Noah
Unlock the secrets of the DVX100 and Final Cut Pro!
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No firewire is not lossless it’s 5:1 compression.
Unlock the secrets of the DVX100 and Final Cut Pro!
https://www.callboxlive.com -
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You could look into a camera with an uncompressed output and bypass DV altogether or use a camera with a lower level of compression. You can for example get excellent comps from an older Panasonic SDX900 at DVCPRO50. Awesome lenses, much better 2/3″ CCDs and half the amount of compression. The rental on one of these for a week or so would probably come to less than the sale price of a DVX100.
-Noah
Unlock the secrets of the DVX100 and Final Cut Pro!
https://www.callboxlive.com -
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