mini-dv vs. DV-Cam for greenscreen footage

[Jonathan Miller]

For all intents and purposes, there is no difference between standard DV and DVCAM. They both have the same color sampling (4:1:1 for NTSC or 4:2:0 for PAL) and both run at 25Mbps. With DVCAM, the tape runs through the camera faster and the audio is locked to the video, but that won’t help with chromakey footage.

If you must use one of those flavors of DV, then maybe look into a keying plug-in specifically designed to work with Mini-DV footage. Or, if you have the budget for a DVCAM camera, then maybe consider going with a consumer HDV camcorder and shooting in HD for delivery in SD. There are still problems keying HDV, but in my experience the added resolution of performing the key in HD and precomping that into an SD comp seems to really help things.

Good luck!

Jon
TreeLine Productions
Fort Collins, CO USA

Currently producing these popular podcasts:

[Nate Biehl]

I did a DV greenscreen project last year, and I got a noticeable improvement in the cleanliness of the key when I changed the way I captured the footage.

I used Apple’s Shake as my keying/compositing software, and manual recommended changing the capture settings to Uncompressed 4:4:4. I’m not sure how this change affected footage that was originally compressed at 4:1:1, but it seemed to key much cleaner with a lot less aliasing than my first attemts that were captured at DV compression.

The files were ENORMOUS, though, (sorry, I don’t remember exact numbers, but they were much larger than the 4:1:1 files) so consider your storage and rendering limitations if you want to try this. I spent a lot of time trying to explain why the project was taking so long.