Cyc or Seamless

[John Sharaf]

Bill,

While it is physically possible to do a walk and talk with seamless. you’ll be severely limited to a head to toe shot at just the beginning and having to possibly garbage matte the sides as the subject approaches the camera. To have the necessary flexibility use as large a white cyc as you can find and afford.

JS

[Todd Terry]

I’m not sure I’d recommend it over a big stretched white cloth cyc… but yes, a couple of times we have put two rolls of seamless paper side by side and covered the seam with a strip of matte white camera tape.

It’s a little bit of trouble to do and get it looking perfect… but it can work. And is probably by far the cheapest route to go if you just need a one-time use kinda thing.

More often than that, we just make sure the background covers the talent sufficiently and don’t worry that much whether it fills the frame. We matte out the rest in post.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Mark Suszko]

Replace the paper with the painted back side of cheap vinyl flooring; much wider, stronger, and easy to walk on. I bring this up a lot, just look up one of my earlier posts about it for details, or ask me here.

[Jason Jenkins]

[Bill Evelyn] “I have a “walk and talk” host with a white seamless backdrop. I’m looking at seamless paper and see it no wider than nine feet, and I know I’m going to need more.”

I was just on a shoot where we were using a 12′ roll of seamless white paper for the backdrop. Unfortunately, I don’t know where it came from.

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

[Bill Evelyn]

Hey, everyone

Thank you, as always, for your help. This forum has prevented gray hairs more than once and I do appreciate it.

It’s looking like matting is the best approach as studio space is limited, as is the backdrop. My thinking is hanging paper behind the talent and matt out the “junk” on either side in post. So, now to make that happen…

Are you using a particular software to accomplish this matte? I’m shooting with an XDcam & editing in Final Cut Pro 7.

Thanks, much

— Bill

Bill

[Todd Terry]

Bill… we did exactly that on a shoot where the client wanted the white limbo look of the “I’m a Mac” Apple spots… you can see the result on the client’s website here (the first and last scenes of the video)…

https://www.connectivity.avocent.com/tv/

The shoot was practical, against white seamless paper. The paper was not wide enough to completely cover the left and right sides of the frame. We were editing in, if I recall, Premiere CS3 (this was a while back, I don’t believe CS4 was out yet). An “overlay” white matte was simply created in Photoshop to extend the sides of the limbo set.

You can see what the pieces look like…

It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea. Actually, in this example not one but a number of mattes were actually used in different layers, not only to extend the set but to eliminate shadows. There was some luminance keying going on in places too to make the white background whiter. But that’s the basic way it works.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Jay Soriano]

Hi Todd,

That is exactly what I will be trying to achieve on an upcoming shoot. Can you please explain your lighting set up? What was used to light the white background? Also, lighting used for talent alone? I’m looking to go with either flo softboxes or flo banks for the background alone. Thanks!

[Todd Terry]

[Jay Soriano] “Can you please explain your lighting set up?”

It was pretty simple… there were basically five instruments in the setup.

Two daylight flos were used as primary lighting to wash the background, on C-stands at each side (you can see the stage left one in the picture in the previous post, the other one is out of frame). A 300w tungsten Pepper fresnel was backlight for the talent, up in the lighting grid at the rear near the seamless roll (I sometimes use a tungsten backlight even with a daylight setup, I like the warm backlight look). The key light on the talent was a single 1200w HMI that was shot up into a 4×4 white bounce card that was high and a bit to one side of the camera. The lighting was nice and even, but a little too flat to be interesting, so I also put a medium-largish softbox to one side of the talent (you can see it in the picture stage right of the actor). The softbox just had a little 150w HMI in it, but it was enough to give a little bit of modeling to the talent and keep it from looking so flat.

I wouldn’t call it a great setup… but it was easy and fast and did the job well enough. This was a pretty low-budget project so we had to run and gun and do it easy and fast… no time or budget to go all Hollywood and hang a grid full of spacelights or anything.

Hope that helps… and makes sense.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Bill Evelyn]

Hey, Todd

Any reason why you chose HMI lights? Were they just the largest sources available to you on this particular shoot?

Thanks,

Bill

[Todd Terry]

[Bill Evelyn] “Any reason why you chose HMI lights?”

I just personally sort of favor daylight balanced light over tungsten usually, but I do plenty of both.

In this case it was more of an intnesity thing, I think. With one 1200w HMI into a big bounce, I could get lots of very bright even coverage primarily with a single instrument. It would have taken about 5000-6000 watts of tungsten light to have equaled that… which would have been harder to rig, a much bigger power draw, and a lot hotter. Plus I just don’t have tungsten instruments of that size or quantity. And at that time I didn’t have on hand any 3200K tubes for my flos which were washing the background, I only had daylight tubes handy.

But that scene definitely could have been lit with either daylight or tungsten balancing… it could go either way.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com