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A good format to be delivered for keying / greenscreening?
Hello All,
I was hoping to get some advice. I’ll be editing together come clips for a website that will start off with an actor against greenscreen, to be composited with whatever backgrounds the producers want, then finally ouput as self-contained clips/quicktimes. They will be shooting the greenscreen footage in one of the Sony Studios in LA, on whatever format the production requests. As far as I can gathterm these clips will not be going back to HD for broadcast or what have you…they will likely be turned into streaming videos or flash animations for th eweb. But given that they know what they’re doing in terms of shooting with greenscreen, I’d like to:
A) start off with a high enough res so that I can key out the green with a good combination of accuracy and efficient workflow, i.e. not spend hours rotoscoping and adjusting feather and tolerance…in both After effects and FCP.
B) have the raw clips not be so huge (like 2k or something), that it will take ages to render out each one when combining it with different backgrounds, for a quicker turnaround of multpile clips.
I’m not going to ask them to shoot DVCAM…i was thinking something on the order of shooting HDCAM at 1280 x 720, progressive, and deliver it to me on a drive as uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2. I’ve worked with footage shot on BetaSP for keying in the past with good results (when loaded as uncompressed), as long as it’s shot right with no cross-confusing green or blue in the actor’s wardrobe, with Ultimatte green and the Ultimatte keying filter in After Effects. Again, as long as it’s shot right, would it be excessive to ask for HD 720P and the correlative 8-bit uncompressed, or shoud I ask for higher/lower res? Thanks in advance.
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5 Replies
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Forgot to add….or just shoot straight to disk as any of these uncompressed formats? Thanks.
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There is no such thing as 720p HDCam. HDCam is only 1080, i or p. The only Sony recorder that supports 720 is HDCam SR, a completely different format, and no current HDCam camera model supports 720.
I think asking for such a thing, given that the delivery is for the Internet, is tremendous overkill. If you have the ability to do so, consider recording standard definition either uncompressed into a computer, or compressed into a low-loss recorder like a Wafian. Proper lighting and distance of the talent from the green screen will be much more of a factor than whether you’re recording in SD or HD for your application, especially if compression is not an issue.
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I just did a show that used chroma key interviews I shot using Sony 790 Digibeta.
The look of this camera is one of my favorites along with the clean tape format.
Used the Boris Continuum Complete software with FCP and it looks fantastic.
Did the timeline uncompressed. Render times are more than I’d like
but that’s the nature of chroma keys on FCP. Ultimate is the same or worse for
render times. My experience with chroma keys is, you can use DVCAM 570
but you need a 411 filter like Nattress and that will smooth out the edges but
I wouldn’t do it on a critical show.
BetaSP 600 is pretty good but it’s noisier in general so the key isn’t as good.
Digibeta 790, the tape is clean and the camera looks nice and it makes
the best key.I guess if you can record to hard disk, you might consider
the Panasonic SDX900 and take the firewire out LIVE to FCP to record it to
DVCPRO 50, which also makes a great key. I did that on another show
and the keys were as good or almost as good as DigiBeta. But I don’t care for
the look of the Panasonic camera as much.Dan
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“There is no such thing as 720p HDCam. HDCam is only 1080, i or p. The only Sony recorder that supports 720 is HDCam SR, a completely different format, and no current HDCam camera model supports 720.
I think asking for such a thing, given that the delivery is for the Internet, is tremendous overkill. If you have the ability to do so, consider recording standard definition either uncompressed into a computer, or compressed into a low-loss recorder like a Wafian. Proper lighting and distance of the talent from the green screen will be much more of a factor than whether you’re recording in SD or HD for your application, especially if compression is not an issue”
Thanks Mike. Yeah, I was wondering if it was ony HDCAM sr for 720. And the more I thought about it, good BetaSP shooting into uncompressed has worked fine in the past, especially for such an ultimately compressed otuput. the studio at which they will be shooting has a dedicated green-screen stage and they’ve done work for some major feature films, so the consensus is that they know what they’re doing. I think SD into 8-bit unc might be the way to go….it’ll also take up less space and processing than the 720.
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Thank you Dan. The more I think about it, DigiBeta or BetaSP to uncompressed is looking like the way to go. I’ll see it they can load straight to diak as uncompressed.
Thanks again to everyone for their insight. Sometimes when you have an entire hardware store at your fingertips, you forget that all you need is a hammer. 😉
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