[Todd Terry]

Yes, if you want something I have or are needing to do any business, then contact me at todd(at)fantasticplastic.com

I still have the filmstock you asked about, but I no longer have the followfocus unit… I sold it a few weeks ago.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I still have it, if you want it contact me off forum at todd(at)fantasticplastic(dot)com

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Yes all of that is true… I’m just saying from a technical and calculatable math standpoint, it makes no difference where the talent is, the only factors that are important to the math are the FOV and distance from the camera to the screen.

If you know where you want your camera, and you know where the screen will be, and you know where within the FOV where you want your talent to frame them like you want for the action you want and be able to light the screen and the talent where you like, those are all fine and good aesthetic choices, but they don’t have any bearing on the math determining how big the greenscreen should be to fill the frame at a given distance.

Unless I’m missing something.

It’s actually a very simple calculation, but I still don’t know that any such app exists.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I don’t recall ever having need for that, but it’s not a bad idea.

I’ll note there is one more variable that is needed to plug in… you also need to know the distance from the camera to the talent, in addition to the ones you mentioned (field of view or focal length and distance from talent to greenscreen).

Hmmm… wait, no… I’m wrong about that. Actually, now that I think about it, you don’t absolutely have to know either the distance from the camera to talent, or the talent to greenscreen. The only factors you need to know are focal length (or FOV) and distance from the camera to the greenscreen… it makes no difference how close the talent is to it to know how big a greenscreen you need to fill the frame.

I can’t say I’ve ever seen such an app (though not saying it doesn’t exist). With all the various calculators out there it shouldn’t be that hard for some savvy app person to develop it… if they had a market for it (couldn’t say whether that exists).

In the meantime, I think that’s just gonna take a bit of drawing and math. Break out the protractor and calculator.

I’ve never needed that or had to ask “How big a greenscreen do I need” because I already have what I have. We have two greenscreens that occasionally go on location. The small one is about 5’x8′ and the bigger one is 10’x20′. So we’ve just always gone with what we had on hand, rather than trying to determine an exact size we might need.

It would be helpful though especially in, say, a permanent or semi-permanent setup… for example, if you were painting or building a greenscreen wall or cyc and didn’t want to create more than was necessary or areas that would never be used.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Well I don’t use the Mark II but I’ve shot with the C300PL since just about the first day they came out, and I know the camera pretty intimately… and I have to say that this is something that I’ve never even thought of.

I don’t know if there is a USB port on your camera… I sure don’t think there is one on mine… never had any reason to even look for one.

Maybe I’m missing something… why not just pop the card in a card reader? Readers are cheap, it’s fast and easy to do, they are not expensive, and it’s so much easier than dragging your camera into an edit suite and hooking it up (and I’d suggest doing the same with your C100, too).

Do you want to do it this way for a particular reason?

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Hey Rich…

Most of your setting seem ok I guess… but I’m not gonna be a WHOLE lot of help. To be honest I’ve never really played hard-n-fast with shooting settings or establish a settings protocol for greenscreen work. Mostly I just shoot as if I was shooting anything else, I just make sure my screen is well and evenly lit.

A couple of your settings I definitely don’t do… I don’t shoot with a higher-than normal shutter speed… unless I”m specifically going for a “narrow shutter” effect (which is rare, if ever) I will still only shoot at a “normal” speed… one over twice the frame rate. I almost never shoot at anything other than 24fps, so for me my usual shutter speed is 1/48th. Of course I totally understand your reasoning… high shutter speed equals sharp images equals clean edges for a better key… I get it. It’s just that I hate the staccato narrow shutter look so much that I would literally sacrifice key cleanliness for more natural looking motion. But, I usually don’t have to, I’ve always managed to get pretty clean keys even with a normal shutter and fast motion… I think it’s more a function of having a really good keyer.

I’ll say the same for f-stops. I probably wouldn’t shoot as high as 5.6. Honestly, I’m a wide-open guy, and will frequently shoot as wide a f/1.3… I just like a shallow look. I know, “But there’s not a background to throw out of focus, so what’s the difference?” Well, even just a headshot of a person with no background looks radically different at f/2 compared to f/5.6. It depends on the circumstances and uses, of course, but often I like the sharp eyes with focus falloff as it goes back. I really (usually) really dislike a head shot that has razor sharp eyes, but also has razor sharp ears… I almost always prefer seeing the focus fall off a bit. Again though, I understand the theory… shoot with a higher f-stop for sharp edges and cleaner keys. But again, I don’t recall ever having too much trouble with edges keying well… again, I think it’s more about having a good keyer.

Through the many years we’ve tried about everything for keying, from Keylight to Ultimatte and everything in between… but for the last while (last few years) we’ve never used anything to key except the Ultra key filter in Premiere (or sometimes in After Effect). It’s just great. I almost never have to do more than just throw it on as a filter and give the eyedropper one click to set the key color. Nine times out of ten that is almost flawless… maybe just a few little tweaks are needed (usually pedestal and choke). I really like Ultra not only because it is so easy, but so controllable… it can easily key transparances… through smoke, or water, or preserve reflections on glass. That’s one way we’ve used it a lot, outside of car windows for driving scenes. It can pretty easily key cleanly and preserve, say, a driver’s reflection in the side window.

I will say though that, like you, hard blacks seem to be the occasional problem area…. sometimes you’ll see a bit of noise there. Last week we had a key that looked flawless in my own edit suite, but when my other editor opened it in his suite upstairs I could see some noise in the blacks on his monitor. The weird thing is, the monitor in my suite (which looked great) is actually a much better monitor that the one that looked a bit noisy in his suite. So… we had to adjust the key so that it not only looked good in the expensive monitor, but in the cheaper one, too.

There’s been a few times that I’ve had to stack keys, and consider one the “primary” main key, and one on top of it that one that more concentrates on preserving blacks and such. Very rarely we’ve had to use garbage mattes to put a black area back in on top, but fortunately that hasn’t happened often.

Rules and settings are a great thing as a starting point… to me though most of the time good keying and compositing winds up to be as much trial and error as anything else.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Eh, Oleksandr, it’s hard to say, the difference is really almost negligible.

If forced to say, I would say the “Before” pic has slightly better lighting on the subject, but the “After” pic has a slightly cleaner key. It’s really only the tiniest of differences, though.

I really think your keys are pretty clean. I’d really say you’re getting to the point where you are worrying over something that you and only you see… to everyone else it will look fine. That is natural, of course, we all see our own flaws much more than anyone else does. But for web-type videos I think they are perfectly fine, good job actually… I’ve definitely seen much worse.

If anything, I’d say crank way up the backlight, if you are using one (or hair light, or rim light, or whatever you choose to call it). That is usually the most neglected instrument in a lot of lighting plots. I always tell people to look at the wide shot on a national talk show when the talent is standing on stage. Invariably the talent’s shadow will be in front of him or her… not behind. That lets us know they are using a very bright backlight. that will also help you, not only by giving a little highlight on the top of the hair and shoulders to give you separation from the background, but might make your key cleaner as well.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Actually, I think your key isn’t too bad… in fact I’d say it’s as good or better than 90% of the ones you see online.

The lighting on your screen is not quite perfectly even, but I don’t think that’s the problem and your setup looks pretty acceptable to me. I did a quick key test without even doing any adjustments or tweaking, and it looks pretty good to me…

I wasn’t keying the way you did, though, I was in Premiere and just threw on the Ultra Key filter and that’s what I got.

I’m going to suggest that rather than trying to tweak on your setup too much more (although you certainly can), you need to tweak on your keying parameters and settings. Now I’m not an Apple guy so I know zero about Final Cut and what all you can adjust there… but I’m sure it is similar to what I can do in Premiere. Just play with all your settings one at a time (in Ultra Key I can adjust transparency, highlight, shadow, tolerance, pedestal, choke, soften, contrast, midpoint, desaturate, range, spill, luma, saturation, hue, luminance) and see if you can get it to improve. I bet you can.

Also, actually while I was reading your post I said to myself “He should try a bit of magenta on the backlight” but then I got to your very last line and see you have some on order. That may help you with spill if you are getting any green fringing around the edges.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

You should have smoother results that way, good luck and let us know how it looks.

Shutter speeds and frame rates are complicated things and people confuse them all the time, but once it settles in your brain it’s pretty simple.

I should have said that there might already be a shutter speed button assigned on your camera, I can’t remember if one is there by default. Before you go to the trouble of assigning a button, it can’t hurt just to start pressing all of the buttons on the port side and on the top monitor and see if any of them highlights the shutter speed number on the monitor. If it does, then that is your shutter speed button and once it is highlighted you should be able to use either the thumbwheel or one of the dials to change the speed. Canon doesn’t make it super intuitive.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

You won’t be given any other options, SPEED is the setting, that’s the “mode” you are in, and the one you want.

Then you use other camera controls to adjust the actual speed, after you are in speed mode. What they are on your camera, I cannot say, for me it’s an assignable button on top (on the monitor module) that I have pre-assigned as shutter speed. When I press that button the shutter speed (which I believe appears at the bottom center of the monitor (which will say something like “48” or “1/48”) will be highlighted, and then you can use probably the thumbwheel on the grip or one of the two dials on the port side of the camera to change that speed. It just depends on what it assigned to those controls.

I’d suggest you find one of the programmable buttons that you are not currently using (or don’t mind using for something else) and program that to “Shutter”… the manual will show you the steps you have to take, I couldn’t go through them off the top of my head.

Incidentally, you could still change the shutter speed when you were in the “ANGLE” mode, it just is expressed in terms of angles rather than fractions of a second (SPEED). The speed setting is much easier to mentally think about.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com