Green Screen and DSLR / Flat picture style

[Daniel Dennis]

Hi, David,

Do you mean shoot the talent flat, or the green screen?

What I typically do is light the green screen to be about 75 IRE at an f4 aperture. This gives me the best saturation of green, and I then light my talent to match the f4 opening. I can still model the light on the talent because I’m about nine feet away from the wall.

The issue I’ve discovered with most DSLRs I’ve used to try and shoot green screen is that the color sampling is not adequate. DSLRs that I’ve worked with shoot using 4:2:0 color sampling (that includes the vaunted Canon 5D Mk III), so making a good key is more difficult. Products like Keylight in Adobe After Effects seem to do a good job, but it’ll take some tweaking. I’m not familiar with Premiere’s keying capabilities, so I can’t help you there. But the more light you pour on the wall, and the flatter it is, the cleaner the key in nearly any instance.

[David Rehm]

Thanks for your reply but you may have misunderstood me (or maybe I didn’t explain myself well).

When I say shoot “flat” – I’m not speaking of the screen being flat. With DSLRs, shooting flat, means you set the camera to pull all the saturation, etc.. out. In post you can put this back in and more.

If you shoot in Standard mode with a DSLR – colors become crushed, esp. the Blacks, and it gives your picture a harsh look. Shooting “flat” takes care of this problem. That’s what I meant by “flat”.

Setting the camera to take out saturation would obviously rid the green color of the screen less vibrant and I was looking for some ideas and advice.

Thanks,
David