Green Screen Mentor Sought

[Vince Becquiot]

Without knowing your budget, but assuming you don’t bring in millions a month (if you do we should talk…), you best option is to use After Effects.

Premiere will give you mediocre results, and that’s if you have a perfectly lit screen.

With After Effect, you can use Keylight (included), or even better, if you can spend $500.00, Primatte from Red Giant. Much easier and quicker to learn and use, and the results are also better in general.

Either way, plan on spending a few weeks just studying it if you are new at it, or I would recommend hiring someone who knows their stuff.

Of course, it all depends on how much hair you have to spare.

Where is that final product going to be shown?

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Yosep Sugiarto]

Hi Bill,

I agree with William McQueen either. But my experiences using green screen and key the BG to motion or stills, better to use After Effect for details, try “Key Light” also but I love “Primatte Keyer” it’s easy… if you want to use the premiere keying, then it means your production must be very good [almost perfect].

The easiest way to do using green screen is:
1. Flatten the Green Screen until you see the color of the green are the same on your Camcorder, of course with lightings.
2. Your object must have a key light on it’s front side and back side, while keeping the BG color remain the same [place the object a bit further from the BG, prevented from shadows].
3. if you have a flat green BG and clear object in front of it, start to shoot, of course if you have camera, put the zebra on the object or subject].
4. RECORD it and later on editing, easy to remove the Green Screen.

Joe

[William Mcqueen]

Thanks for the replies, I appreciate it.

The tape was already shot on BETA SP NTSC(it appears to have been in a studio – a very large green screen BG).

I ran into a singer and her husband and they want to make a Music DVD for their church. It is lower than a low budget production. I’m just trying to help them as they are immigrant people from Central Africa. They are well educated folks, but know nothing about production.

Anyway, I figured it was time to learn how to do this anyway.

But, I don’t have after effects, and have Premiere CS3 and Encore. If I can find a deal on CS4 can they be integrated? Or, do they need to be?

Cheers,
Bill in Toronto

[George Socka]

If you have the CS3 production suite then you have Ultra which works beautifully. See some samples on my blog beachdigital.blogspot.com. There is a bit in the Order of Canada native art clip, the talking stick, that was keyed against just a grey wall. The Charles Taylor prize clips were shot against a collapsible green screen with minimal light in a book store. The lighting for the politician was a bit better. I gotta re-do the white rabbit – that was a demo that was abandonned so I did not invest more time on getting the key right.

George in Toronto

George Socka
BeachDigital
http://www.beachdigital.com