Angelo Lorenzo
Forum Replies Created
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1) I can’t say. I’m not familiar enough with that camera to know the quirks/drawbacks with some of the extended hacks.
2) Yes, exactly. You’ll want to make sure it’s capable of outputting an image that displays nothing over it like a red recording circle, runtime, histogram, etc.
3) Since you don’t have to light theatrically per se (this seems like talking head stuff) then there are some tricks to aid in separation. A hair/rim light is always a nice choice and you can combat some of the spill by putting on a 1/4 or 1/8 magenta (aka minus-green) gel on those rim lights or, if it makes sense and you have a 1/8th, the fill light.
If you have 20×20 solids, you could hang those on the far end of the green screen walls to reduce spill further. Anything that isn’t directly behind the announcer will be garbage matted out so always consider that solution.
4) There are a number of technical issues. Number one is probably the skill of the person pulling the green screen key. Full body shots have a lot of spill and lower edge detail – does your production have the expertise and time to make these shots look good or nearly as good as the easier mediums/close ups?
You could shoot with the camera on its side (portrait orientation) if your host isn’t a big hands talker. This buys you much more resolution to pull a key with.
Secondly, if this is the gateway to eventually selling this or signing a contract with a customer, try to play it safe. Shooting a medium wide or closeup exposes you less to more difficult green screen situations. Try shooting a full body, but shoot an alternate in the medium in case issues arise in post. Keep your bases covered.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
Well, I would lean towards the GH2. Why?
– Both Sony cameras use HDV which is an MPEG2 based format with a bitrate around 25mbps
– The Panasonic GH2 uses an H.264 codec at about 24mbps. Since the compression is much more efficient I think you’ll find you have less compression artifacts. Hacked GH2’s also have higher bitrates.
All the cameras, hacks not withstanding, record with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling which is really not ideal for green screen work.
If you have any kind of budget, consider getting an external recorder that can record from HDMI (if the GH2 displays a clean signal with no info overlays), which is capable of 4:2:2 recording. Something like the Atomos Ninja.
In terms of lighting the green screen, it’s difficult without knowing what you have. Hopefully you have some spacelights https://blog.adoramarentals.com/tag/continuous-lighting/ otherwise you’ll just have to take fresnel lights, put them on full flood, mount some silks/frost if you can (2×2 frames for instance), and space them accordingly.
My advice, on something where you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, I strongly suggest you avoid shooting full body shots on green. These cause all kinds of keying issues even if well lit and if not keyed correctly, they can really lower the apparent quality of a production. To simplify the keying process, any time you aren’t shooting full body shots, place black duvetyne to cover the green floor, this will greatly wrangle green spill.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
Do you have any energy saving settings turned on that may turn off idle hard drives? You can get similar performance issues as the idle drive has to spin up once you hit play. This would be my first guess.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
Nice solution! Love it.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
Two solutions:
– Keyframe one track. Go to the Effects Control panel and select Volume and hit copy. Select the second track, and select Volume in the Effects Control panel and hit paste. This will copy keyframes.
– Create a stereo submix track, assign the two channels and keyframe the volume of the submix.
Whichever solution floats your boat since you’re working in dual channel stereo.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
Are you exporting MOV? As far as I can remember, you were never able to set the audio bitrate within Premiere, at least not the last few versions.
As a simple solution you could export as .h264 which allows greater control, then rewrap the file as an MOV with something like https://www.squared5.com/
At that point, the streams aren’t recompressed, they’re just taken out of an MPEG container and put in an MOV container.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
What’s your font size? Credits in SD start maintaining readability at 20-24pt and larger. I’ve seen up to 36pt recommended as well.
It sounds like your television isn’t displaying the text with enough resolution because of the size… and you may be getting some after image from the phosphors in terms of the weird colors; the latter can’t be avoided because it’s just how standard def tvs work.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
If you aren’t afraid of the command line, and you’re familiar with video formats then check out FFMPEG. It’s not for those who are green to video conversion.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
I recently discovered the same issue. The video is not black. Click on each clip. In the Effects control panel, click on “Motion”. For whatever reason, the clips import with a scale of 0 instead of 100. Fix this for each clip (tedious) and you should be perfectly fine after that.
I’ve reported this to Adobe, but power in numbers so I suggest you report it as a bug as well.
I’ve not found a work-around for it yet and it’s a weak point in coloring/conforming with Redcine-X when using Premiere.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
Look at the multiband compressor. You’ll want to mess around with compressing the lower frequencies; somewhere between 30-100Hz. That should minimize the issue.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks