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TV quality vs CPU screen quality
OK. I have been shooting green screen footage this weekend with my panasonic dvc 30 and I am using 2 250 watts smith victor flood lights. The quality looks great on my TV screen but the quality on my cpu does not look to good(grainy and pixelated(I do not think it is an interlacing problem). I know there are a lot of factors and TV and PC monitor differ big time.
How do I make the quality of my footage look less grainy(without softening the footage) and sharper(without making the color of the footage to harsh). The quality is not bad I just need the image to have more clarity and definition in the face and hands.
I do have squeeze 4, AE 7 pro, final cut studio 2, and PPro2. I just cannot find a good starting point in these programs to solve this issue. I am thinking one of these programs have a compression preset I can use.
The output will be .mov and .avi within an interactive acrobat pdf, flash video for the web, and interactive CD-rom probably flash video format.
Please note: I am upgrading the my lighting system soon.
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5 Replies
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Good to hear you plan on upgrading your lights, 2 250 watt lights is far from ideal. Really, a good greenscreen setup should include 2 500 watt softboxes for lighting the greenscreen itself depending on how large it is, plus several lights for your actor – perhaps 1 500-1,000 watt key, 1 500 watt softbox fill, and a 250 watt hairlight. Some people will say this is overkill for digital video, but after years of shooting greenscreen footage I say not. The more lighting the better the resulting key, because you can stop your lens down a lot more and get really sharp, clean footage.
Here are some possible reasons for the problems you’re having:
1. The lower powered lights. The less light you shoot with, the more grain your footage will have. Not much you can do this time around.
2. Did you capture your footage to Quicktime files? If so, one thing you can try is to open a clip, go to WINDOW>SHOW MOVIE PROPERTIES and select the Video Track from the list at the top of this window. A Visual Settings tab will appear. In the bottom right-hand corner of the Visual Setting Tab there is a check box for “High Quality.” make sure that is ticked on. Sometimes this makes a big difference, sometimes none at all.
3. Is it possible that you have Final Cut set up to lower the quality in order to play back in real time? Check your RT settings and put them all at highest quality to make sure this isn’t the problem. If you don’t know how to set this, it’s a little dropdown on the far left of the timeline called RT (at least is was in FCP 5)
4. What codec did you capture to? This info could help a lot in diagnosis.
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Hi,
If the film doesn’t show problems in the TV, them you don’t have to worry about interlacing. Trust your TV better than your computer screen.
About the quality of the picture you should have a look to the Nattress “Chroma Sharpening”. Your blue-screen will thanks you.
Cheers,
rafael -
Thanks guys!!!
beenyweenies your light info really helped me decide on my next lighting kit. I am trying my PC first, so the current codec is DV .avi. I have not tried encoding on my mac yet for FCS 2.
I know what you are talking about with the hi quality function in Quicktime. In the past, I have imported the files into FCP 5 and AE 7, the quality goes back to the normal mode. Even if I have saved the footage as hi quality. Am I missing something?
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I don’t know if you’re missing something, but if you figure it out let me know! That whole “high quality” thing makes no sense to me.
If you’re using DV, don’t worry quite as much about the quality of the video in your computer, it will always look worse than on a TV screen. The most important part is being able to get a good key with DV footage, which is a whole other can-o-worms.
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You might want to try a filter called dvmatte. It does a pretty good job helping you key DV footage. It’s been a while since I used it so I kind of forget how much it improves your keying. You can try out a fully functioning demo of it at dvgarage.com.
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