[BLue screen] Which blue is used?

[Jamie Cunningham]

With the keyers these days I don’t think it really matters what exact color of blue you get. As long as it’s consistant and contrasts with the actor. I’ve heard that green is better for DV and contrasts better with a human subject, but just as important is the lighting and set up of the shot. 🙂

Make sure you get good even lighting on the screen and try not to get any light bounced onto the actor from the screen. I usually place my actor several feet from the screen and that avoids shadows on the screen and light spill…

Hope that helps! There are a ton of greenscreen (or or better termed “Chromakey”) tutorials out on the net as well 🙂

Jamie

[Ambitious_mind]

Thanks Jamie for the info. Actually I have only read that blue is the better color hehe..But I have no experience with this so… I’ll probably just get both colors and see which works best.

Still kind of wondering what light I am gonna use…but I’ll look up the tutorials you mentioned.

Thnx

Ambitious Mind
“Always thinking…”
“Helping where ever I can”

[Ron Lindeboom]

Blue is not necessarily a better or worse color. The background key color should be chosen based on what is *not* in the scene. If your actor is in blue clothing, then blue would be a terrible choice for a keying color. People often limit things to either green or blue but with today’s powerful keying software, I have seen people shoot and key with red backgrounds and other colors based on the shot.

As Jamie Cunningham pointed out, the secret to pulling a good key is to well and evenly light the background and get the talent far enough away so that your background lighting is not spilling over onto the talent.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

[Chris Smith]

There is no magic color paint that is the best color for keying. We’ve shot greenscreen elements with the most optimum color paint that was $80 a gallon down to a 12x green grid cloth outside that is about the color of Kermit’s backside. They both keyed perfectly fine. So don’t beat yourself up about it the exact color.

Ideally though it’s a green that once you get your footage into your compositor and you sample the green BG (or blue or red bg) that the color is electronically pure. So for green it would sample as R0, B0, G255 in 8 bit color anyways. But this may never ever happen so don’t sweat it.

Remeber a key is just for the very edges between the subject and the screen. So if there are parts of the image that the subject will never touch, don’t waste time lighting or painting that area. It will just be garbage masked out anyways.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com