Rick Wise
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The advantage of a hard light is that it is easier to adjust. Here’s an example: your talent has white hair and is wearing a dark jacket. In such as case you would probably adjust the intensity of a hard light, preferably in the flood position, so that the suit separates from the background. Then you’d add a split double or split triple or two split doubles to the light, positioning them so that the wire part hits the head, and the clear part hits his suit.
You can always make a hard light into a soft light by adding some diffusion to its barn doors or by flying diffusion out in front. A soft light can be only a soft light. To split the intensity with a soft light you must use a C-stand with grip doubles and singles.
Since you will have to use a hard light that does not match your key lights, buy several sheets of 1/8 minus green so that you can roughly make the light match your key. Also get some 1/4 CTB and some 1/4 CTO so you can warm or cool the backlight to taste. I’d recommend also a sheet of opal and also 1/2 gird cloth to give you the option of a softer backlight.
I find — others have different tastes — that the only purpose of the backlight is to make a nearly invisible separation of the subject from the background.
With green screen, you never want your backlight to scream at you. A hot rim makes for a very bad key.
Rick Wise
director of photography
and custom lighting design
Oakland, CA
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.recessionvideo.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com -
You would be best served by sticking to a single manufacturer of fluorescent bulbs. The reason: the amount of green spike will vary considerably between them. So if you stick to one company, you have a better chance of needing to only manually balance your video camera. If you mix light from two different companies, you may find that one is more green than the other, and that you need to add minus-green gels to one to try to balance to the bulbs to the other. Who makes your fluorescent soft boxes? Stick with the same company for your green screen and back-lights.
You are correct that you will need at least two lights for the green screen. Since you need to light the screen evenly across the visible screen, two lights might or might not make it. You may need two more, one from the floor in the middle and one from the ceiling in the middle. (If you do need a floor unit, you will probably need to raise your talent on a platform so the camera doesn’t see this light. It is obviously easier to hide Kino-Flo style units than large round ones.)
I have no hands-on experience with any of these units. One of them is not a fluorescent type at all.
Note that for your green-screen units, a different green spike from the other units would not be serious. But all lights hitting talent should balance to each other on the green-magenta axis if at all possible. (You may, however, want to cool or warm the backlight, depending on the talent’s hair color. That’s a different issue. In that case, cooler or warmer hair-light, we are talking about the blue-red color axis. The more nasty one to control is the green-magenta axis.)
Rick Wise
director of photography
and custom lighting design
Oakland, CA
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.recessionvideo.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com -
About editing: If you have already begun to edit with FCP, then by all means continue down that road. There is another NLE made by Sony, Vegas (currently version 9)that is much, much easier to learn, every bit as powerful, and often much easier to use. However, your Mac would need to be able to run Windows, and you would need Windows installed. Note that Vegas is about 1/2 the price of FCP.
On the other hand, if you foresee hiring yourself out as a freelance editor, you do need FCP. Neither is anywhere near the same to use as Avid, other than basic concepts of bins, storytelling etc.
About cameras: the advice above is great. Probably not what you want to hear, but worth at least considering.
Rick Wise
director of photography
and custom lighting design
Oakland, CA
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.recessionvideo.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com -
Sam, the people on this forum generously give their time to questions posted here. You seem to expect each of us to hold your hand tightly through thick and thin without lifting any of your own fingers to help your self. Everyone here has learned his or her craft and art through a combination of doing and mentorship. You seem unwilling to do that. You have been given tons of great advice. Don’t want to accept it? Fine. Stop whining. Go out and do your job. Learn by trial and error. It’s a great teacher, at every level. Otherwise, find a good film school, and take some beginning classes. This forum cannot be a complete school. But it is a place of learning, for those who are willing to hear even what they don’t want to hear.
Rick Wise
director of photography
and custom lighting design
Oakland, CA
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.recessionvideo.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com -
Part of the “trick” to pulling this off is making sure the fuz material itself is not too sharp. I’ve often used a clean, seamless and untorn 6×6 or 8×8 double or single net stretched tight in a frame for the purpose. However, the net has to be soft focus itself or it will show for what it is. You can also make it more opaque by lighting it up, or more transparent by keeping light of off the surface. Some people like to use white bobinette for a similar purpose.
As mentioned, keep the iris as close to wide open, and the lens on the long side.
Rick Wise
director of photography
and custom lighting design
Oakland, CA
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.recessionvideo.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com -
Todd is so right: just because you have a camera and some lights and some editing gear does not mean you know how to make video stories of any sort. But if you want to try this, then go very, very cheap and see if you can make it work.
Camera: HV30, $600 on sale at Bhphotovideo.com https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/539289-REG/Canon_2680B001_VIXIA_HV30_HDV_High.html — get at least one extra battery
mic: Rode video, $149, https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/363083-REG/Rode_VIDEOMIC_VideoMic_Camera_Mounted.html; make sure the mic is no more than 4 feet from the speaker(s)
editing software: if you have a PC, Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum, $90, https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/575590-REG/Sony_SPPMS9000_Vegas_Movie_Studio_9.html; if you have Macs, Final Cut Express, $150 — this one is much, much harder to learn than the Vegas. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?ci=0&shs=final+cut+express&sb=ps&pn=1&sq=desc&InitialSearch=yes&O=jsp%2Fproduct.jsp&A=search&Q=*&bhs=t&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=submitFor starters, do not buy anything else. Shoot hand held, available light. If shooting interviews, brace your arm on a table, chair back, pillow. Use windows if there any for “key” lighting. Set the camera to auto everything. Get some images. Play with editing with the software above. Vegas will be much, much easier to learn, and will allow you to do everything and more than Final Cut. The latter has dominated the market for some time, especially in the pro format. But Final Cut is infinitely harder to learn and more cumbersome to use. These consumer versions of the software are all you need to get started.
Then you can evaluate whether or not this is really something you want to continue with. This project will consume an enormous amount of your time, so you had better love doing it…. At least your initial investment is limited to around $900. The main expense will be paying for your time.
Rick Wise
director of photography
and custom lighting design
Oakland, CA
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.recessionvideo.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com -
A brief addendum to Richard’s long post: color is measured along two different axes.
One of them is the blue-red (or orange) axis. When you are talking about “daylight” or “tungsten” bulbs, that’s the axis you are referring to.
The other axis is magenta-green. This is the axis most of Richard’s post refers to.
Good color meters measure both. The blue-red axis is measured in Kelvin units (3200K = tungsten, 5500K is roughly standard daylight.) The magenta-green axis is measured in CC (Color compensating) units.
ALL lights emit light that can be measured along each axis. “Full Spectrum” lights are neutral along the magenta-green axis, but will be balanced either for daylight or for tungsten (blue-red axis) and be either more blue (daylight) or more orange (tungsten.) With orange gel a daylight bulb can become a temporary “tungsten” bulb, and equally a tungsten unit can be turned into a daylight unit with the addition of a blue gel. These days, we mostly add only 1/2 orange or 1/2 blue for this last conversion. Full correction looks false.
Rick Wise
director of photography
and custom lighting design
Oakland, CA
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.recessionvideo.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com -
Start by closing down everything and rebooting the computer.
Rick Wise
director of photography
and custom lighting design
Oakland, CA
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.recessionvideo.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com -
Bob, John is spot on about the gear. This is something he knows tons more about than I do. I just looked up the cost of renting a single PDW700 out of Boston: $675/day (https://www.rule.com/products/1527). It’s all the support gear and people that really add up.
Get some bids!
Then, if your French friends throw up their hands in dispair, I suggest you keep the conversation going. Talk with them about some plan B which will not be so professional but could possibly meet their needs. (I lived in France for six years and know they love to cobble things together to do the “impossible.”)
Since you are in Louisiana, I suspect you’ll need to rent out of Texas or New York.
Rick Wise
director of photography
and custom lighting design
Oakland, CA
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.recessionvideo.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com -
Richard,
Your post on using a meter with your HVX200 is so thoughtful and clearly comes from lots and lots of experience and thought. As an old film guy (I first started shooting exactly 50 years ago) who became by necessity also adept at video, I find I almost never use a meter for the latter. Here’s why: I cannot find a consistent “ASA” for video. At low light levels, cameras respond with different sensitivity than at high light levels. What I do use extensively, when I don’t have the luxury of a video tech with a fully calibrated monitor, are zebras. When shooting Caucasian faces,I set the zebras to 70, and adjust exposure so that there is just a tiny bit of zebra on the highlights of the face. If the subject has dark skin, I “borrow” a Caucasian to set exposure. If shooting landscapes, I set the zebras to 100 and make sure most of the image does not have any. A lot here depends on the shot: lots of sky with white clouds? Then I’ll adjust the iris so that those clouds will have significant zebras. Just a dark, grungy street? Much harder to evaluate. Best to put a Caucasian face in the shot for a moment, adjust exposure as above, remove the face, and shoot.
I agree that moving around with a meter the way you do is a terrific way to get your mind thinking about exposure. The part I find difficult to impress on my film and video students is to find your base exposure, and then light the rest of the scene to your eye. Trial and error, a long learning process.
Rick Wise
director of photography
and custom lighting design
Oakland, CA
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.recessionvideo.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com