Shooting an old train on Green screen

[Simon Ubsdell]

I would say that the benefits of using Fusion (which you can get for free, unlike Nuke) would outweigh any learning curve for this kind of job.

But then I started on Fusion at a time when Ae barely existed, so I guess I am not the best person to ask.

If you are staying in Ae, I hope you won’t mind my recommending that you look at Hawaiki Keyer (which I have developed with my brilliant partner, Rob Mackintosh), which in addition to creating great-looking keys with the minimum of guesswork, brings you a whole range of advanced compositing features that are not available in any other keyer at any level, and which will have another feature-rich update fairly soon. There is a free trial version so you can experiment and see whether it is useful to you.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

It’s always a good idea to have a really strong sense of the lighting you want even in a green screen situation.

It’s never an easy accommodation to pull off but this is a nice example of how you can add greater realism and dynamism to the lighting which is often the biggest problem with green screen.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Richard Herd]

[Simon Ubsdell] “underexposed green screen”

Getting back to the basics. What does underexposed mean?

Let’s make it easy. We have 5 stops of latitude: 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8

IMO “underexposed” means everything darker than 2, and overexposed means everything brighter than 8.

Supposing we place the talent at f/4, in a reflection heavy environment, at what f/stop should we light the greenscreen?

Thanks!

[Simon Ubsdell]

The very authoritative VES Handbook of Visual Effects (pp.111-112) recommends something rather different from what you often read from DOPs and others, which is that you should aim for a half to one stop of underexposure in relation to the foreground.

“A common misconception is that backing brightness should be adjusted to match the level of the foreground illumination. … To reproduce the full range of transparency, the green screen should be fully – but not over – exposed. In other words, its brightness should match the green component of a well-exposed white object like a white shirt, roughly defined a the whitest white in the foreground that still has detail.”

My take on this is that it’s complicated … a lot more complicated than can simply be explained here.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Blaise Douros]

You might also try shooting with a full blackout outside of the window, and using a simple blending mode to overlay your “outside” footage. That would preserve your dirt and reflections.

Or, go old-school (which is back in fashion now) and shoot background plates for your exterior, and fire that footage onto a projection screen outside. You could even run the same clip a half second ahead on a second projector shooting in the window, out of focus, to simulate the effects of that lighting on the actor.

Like Oblivion, on a smaller scale. And you don’t need the huge screens, because you’re only seeing out of a single window.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyHwDizJ-xE

Spend a bit more on set to get it practically, save a headache in post.

It would be worth shooting tests, if you can swing it. Quick and dirty, same interior lighting setup, grab two or three shots per setup, and change the exterior setup between takes. Then you can walk in to the shooting day confident.

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