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Best option for HDV green screen
I have a project that is going to include green screen shot on HDV. I’ve read all the admonitions against this but sometimes we don’t get to choose our own poison.
I’ll be editing in FCP and doing the green screen compositing in After Effects with Keylight.
What’s the best advice for how to capture the HDV material? I can bring it in as native HDV. I can bring it in as ProRes. Or I can bring it in as something else, such as 720p, through my Kona 3 card. I’m leaning toward option three but part of me thinks that working in the native format, even though it’s HDV, might present fewer keying issues than something that’s been transcoded. But I just don’t know.
Has anyone here done one or more of these options successfully? (And, yes, I’m well-versed in how the green screen should be shot. This is a post question.)
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5 Replies
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My recommendation is to transcode to ProRes. You want to use the best color space for your key. Also, both versions of ProRes are 10 bit.
John
MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor
ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE Enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5Final Cut Studio 2 (up to date)
Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN
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Be sure to apply green blur preset in Effects & Presets to clean up noise.
Richard M. Harrington, PMP
Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Studio On the Spot and ATS:iWork
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Thanks to both of you. (I just got back from out of town and returned to the COW this morning.)
Richard, when do you apply that green blur? I haven’t done that before and it sounds like a great idea. Do you do that in FCP or AE or Keylight? Sorry… I’m just unaware.
Cheers,
Lee
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Hey there! Which camera are you using?
Here’s another option that I’ve done a few times, it involves some extra production setup, though.
If you have the option of capturing to the Kona live on set from an output on the camera that’s offering an output closer to the data the censor is capturing before it gets converted to HDV, you can improve the fidelity of your green screen.
Example – shooting using a Sony V1U, we ran the HDMI to an AJA Io. We did the same thing coming out of an EX-1 using HD-SDI. The video coming out of these cameras were 1920×1080 (so you have more resolution than the native 1440×1080 of HDV), and the chroma subsampling is 4:2:2 (so you have more color information than either HDV or XDCAM-EX).
The difference is subtle but noticeable. It’s no substitute for lighting the green screen right, of course, and like I said, this might be more trouble than you’re wanting to go through on set. You’ll also need to make sure that you have a hard drive fast enough to maintain the data rate over that period of time.
One last note, even without this setup, I’ve been very happy with using Primatte Keyer Pro in FCP. Not sure if you have the option, but that plug in is ten times better than the built-in FCP chroma key tools.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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Thanks for the IO suggestion. My AJA product is a Kona 3 which is, of course, installed in my edit computer. So I can’t take it into the field easily. But I we could do the shoot in my office I would use your acquisition advice! Yes, I’l be you get a good image that way.
I use KeyLight in After Effects and have also have good results.
Thanks again.
— Ron
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