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Backlit greenscreen
I’ve built a few greenscreens, and it’s always been a pain to light them in tight spaces battling flags, hotspots and all the rest.
Meanwhile, the light itself is generally coming from large softboxes whose purpose is to diffuse the light so it emits evenly across the diffuser surface.
But wait… that’s exactly what we want from a greenscreen… for it to be evenly lit across the surface. It occurred to me today that perhaps the entire process is backward… that it’s actually better to light a greenscreen from behind as led strips can be evenly spaced across the entire surface evenly, and can be diffused in multiple stages if necessary to get a completely even lighting across the entire surface that’s just not possible with any sort of front edge lit approach.
I see only two downsides. First, it limits the choice of screen materials (no more painting directly on the wall). Second, it takes a bit of space. With modern LED’s, though, I don’t see why it would need to take more than a foot… which is considerably LESS space than is taken up by the multiple lights used to front-light a screen, and it completely eliminates the need to go so wide. So the second problem is actually a benefit.
A floor would be more problematic as it needs to hold weight and materials choice is already limited, but a backlit floorstanding greenscreen would seem to be an ideal solution. If not, I’d love to hear why, but from the perspective of space, evenness of lighting, etc it seems like a better approach.
Has anyone done this? I can’t find any chatter about it.
I’ve never tried to build such a thing, and not up on the latest led strip details, but any thoughts on what the front sheet material should be? Green with white lights passing through? White (also then serves as white backdrop) that’s lit by green LED’s? Some other combo?