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Green Screen and Virtual Set Question
Hello,
This is a unique post. I’m not sure which forum it’s appropriate for, so I figured I’d start here. If anyone thinks this question is better asked in another forum, feel free to re-direct me.
We are doing an SD green screen shoot. The shoot is a game show setup an includes three contestants standing behind podia. We have bought a virtual set to use in the spot. My question is pretty straight forward. Should the subjects be shot as close as possible to the scale of how they’ll appear in the virtual set? Obviously subjects can be shrunk via the scale function in any NLE, but, in my experience, that sometimes results in distortion, especially when scaling down a large amount. I ran a test scaling down our test footage with both Premiere CS4, and After Effects CS4. The results were identical, and lead me to believe the scale feature functions the same way in both applications. The test footage was a waist up shot, that I then scaled down to 14% to fit into the virtual set. The scaled down footage looked somewhat fuzzy. We are renting a large studio space for this shoot. I am thinking about printing out transparent images of the virutal set and laying them over a flat-screen monitor, which would help us to shoot the subjects at the right distances and perspectives relative to the virtual set. I have shot many-a-green-screen in my day, but I’ve never worked with a virtual set like this. Any thoughts?
Best,
Aaron Cadieux
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3 Replies
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Scaling down always looks better than scaling up. But with judicious use of garbage masks and mattes, there’s no reason I can think of that you can’t shoot the people at the final frame size they need to be, IMO.
You said it is in SD, there are many flavors of that now; what codec are you going to shoot and work in? Because DV25 works, but is not the most awesome format for precision greenscreen work.
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Mark,
Unfortunately, we’re shooting this on good ‘ole MiniDV, which I know sucks for chromakeying.
-Aaron
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Edit it in a better format timeline; you don’t gain anything, then again, you won’t lose any more. Get your people shot at exactly the right size to start with then.
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