Will A Pink Screen Work?

[Nate Hanson]

I don’t think pink will work very well. I think the main reason they use green or blue screens is because those colors are very different from most skin tones. Pink is much closer to the colors in skin so when you try to key it out, you will probably pull from the subject’s skin also.

But the experts in here may know how to work around that.

Nate

[Brian Charles]

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is :

Depends on what other colors are present in the video. Green and blue are the most common colors to key against because human skin tones (no matter what race) are unaffected.

From your description, I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve but it sounds like a simple matte or mask would do the trick.

Chroma keys really just produce mattes anyway.

[Steve Roberts]

[Brian Charles] “Depends on what other colors are present in the video. Green and blue are the most common colors to key against because human skin tones (no matter what race) are unaffected.”

Yes. I’d add that the background had better appear highly saturated to the camera. It may be pink paper, but if you don’t light it so it looks like a saturated pink (magenta), you’ll get grays in it which will start to blend with grays in your subject.

But for Caucasian and other light-skinned people, it’s a very bad idea. For dark-skinned people, it’s risky. Unless you’re shooting green or blue objects on the paper, don’t use it.

[Michael Brodner]

What im doing is, setting the camera up so it filming directly down onto a surface…like a brown table. Then all i am doing is having a handful of polaroid pictures lined up next to each other and each one will have video inside it where the picture normally would be. the camera never moves and there are no people involved in this shot except the video that will be placed inside the pictures. see?

[Jason Milligan]

My advice is take a few large photos of the individual polaroids. Take them into Photoshop or AE and mask out the background. It’ll be easy, they are rectangles. Then, in AE, you can build your scene however you see fit. You can also precomp each polaroid and place the moving video inside the precomp. Turn those comps into 3D layers and you can manipulate them however you want without struggling to match perspective.

I think you may have a harder time pulling a key than just creating your own masks.

[Frank Thomas]

From your description (assuming I understand correctly), it sounds like no keying would be necessary. Have you tried using the corner pin effect to place the video over the individual polaroids?

[Darby Edelen]

[Michael Brodner] “I want to have a polaroid picture with video inside of it”

Use an undeveloped polaroid. The black interior and white rim are already almost a matte! You might need to use a Levels or Curves effect to push the almost black values in the center into black and the almost white values on the border into white, but it should be relatively easy.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Michael Brodner]

Hey thanks to everyone who messaged me about this little project I am trying to tackle. Check out the test I did last night for it. I posted it on my site. It’s basically the angle and idea I’m going for. What do u think?

Bones

http://www.MichaelBrodner.com