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Bluescreen work
Hi!
I`m planning this short with lots of blue and maybe some green screens shots.
I know that the preferred format for this work is film or HD. My budget won`t allow for a HD shoot. So then there is SD. I read that DigiBeta works better with bluescreen scenes, due to the higher color resolution. But I don`t have the deck. Streaming from a DVX is more easy.So – is the DVX capable of doing serious bluescreen work?
This short is ment to be a proffesional gig, not a homemovie. I have to impress the business, you know 🙂 -
5 Replies
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Look at Serious Magic’s Ultra keying software to see what can be done with DV.
No DV camera will be ideal for greenscreen or bluescreen work — DV’s color sampling is very low. Even a $15,000 DSR450WSL would be less than ideal for greenscreen. You’d be much better off with 4:2:2.
But if you can’t get 4:2:2, then use the best DV camera you can, and look at keying software that’s made to work with DV’s limitations — something like Ultra.
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If you have to use a DV camera to shot blue/greenscreen, this is the best one. This probably goes w/out saying but be sure to shoot it progressive. For keying I’d suggest using DvMattePro from dvgarage.com it’s cheap and works very well with DV. I use it for D1 footage at work all the time. A friend of mine recently used the DVX to shoot a short entirely on greenscreen, he used DvMattePro and it worked nicely.
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I’ve shot greenscreen with both Beta and the DVX100 and found the DVX to be superior as to the keys I could pull. Bottom line of course is lighting. Get that right and it’s a piece of cake, blow it even slightly and your post will take forever.
Noah
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Interesting answers, I thought Beta would have given you better results. One of the biggest problems with using DV cameras for this process isn’t the color but the fact that all mini-DV cameras use a heavy compression. When shooting a subject against a bright blue / green with cause very contrasty edges which get highly compressed and cause lots of artifacting around the image which can cause a harder process to remove the crunchy blue / green edge around your subject.
Everything they mentioned is true. Good lighting, better cammeras and so on. Best thing is to shoot uncompressed, digitize in to your computer uncompressed and that would give you the best results. But I understand the money thing too.
-Lars
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One big thing I forgot to mention is that I usually wash my shots through Nattress’s G-Nicer filter before keying to upsample the chroma information. This gives me much cleaner edges from DV footage.
https://www.nattress.com/filmEffects.htm
-Noah
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