Problem w/green screen keying properly.

Field Production

Problem w/green screen keying properly.

Posted by Luis Perez on March 3, 2011 at 10:32 am

Hello all…I have lit, shot and edited scattered green screen productions over the years, but always with people as subjects. I have always had good results especially since the subjects were far enough away from the background and light spill.

My problem now is I am doing a product green screen shot consisting of a white plastic pill bottle with a label that has both green, purple, black and white colors on the label. Using a blue screen cloth, I set the bottle on the cloth so there is blue underneath and behind the bottle, and As you can guess, there is too much blue spill onto the bottom and sides of the white pill bottle causing bad keying. I’m using FCP and Chroma Keying filters.

Is there a better way to do this? How can you separate the product from the background, especially if I also want to shoot the bottle with some of the pills sitting in front of it? Is it best to just take a still shot of the bottle and use Photoshop with its superior tools, and cut out the bottle and just bring it back into FCP?

Thanks for all suggestions…

MacBook Pro
Mac OS X 10.6.5
c.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Sony PDW 700 XDCAM HD/SD

Luis Perez replied 15 years, 2 months ago 3 Members · 5 Replies
5 Replies

Chris Tompkins
March 3, 2011 at 12:10 pm

This is real easy if the camera does not move.
Crop it out.
Mask.
Easier in AE in FCP.
If it’s still, heck, take it to PhotoShop. Even easier.
If you’re zooming in on the shot then, you’ll need to roto-scope, so to speak, mask out all the frames. I would do it in AE.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC
Luis Perez
March 3, 2011 at 2:02 pm

I did crop and mask but the bottom of the pill bottle is semi-circled and it is tough to get a perfect mask to fit… plus since the label has a lot of blue and green plus black and white I just can’t seem to get a clean overall key…

Any other thoughts? Thanks
Chris Tompkins
March 4, 2011 at 5:44 pm

Is there motion or action in the shot?

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC
Michal Trzaska
March 5, 2011 at 3:47 am

I would try rotoscoping, but you still will have the spill to deal with. Black, white (or gray) BG may help with that. With a black or white back maybe messing with a luma key can help.

Let me know how u solved the problem
Luis Perez
March 10, 2011 at 5:29 pm

So I fixed the problem by suspending the pill bottles on a thin piece of glass over the blue screen and shooting them straight on. This totally reduced the spillage on the bottle and gave me a clean key. all I had to do was crop the bottom up to get rid of the glass. As I was shooting straight on it was no problem to crop to the bottom of the pill bottles.

For other shots with the pills laying in front of the bottle, bottles, I just shot down on them at a higher angle with no keying… I used natural settings as well as a product photo tent that I purchased with great results…

Thanks for all your help…

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