It’s the secret sauce of special effect-filled movies like Avatar & The Matrix.
Weathermen use it everyday.
And if you’re in church-media, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll find a use for…
….the “green screen.”
After the jump, we’ll take a whirlwind tour of what green screens do, how to set them up, and how to key out a color using After Effects.
Plus, there’s a timelapse video. And that’s just plain neat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfZuLNLUPoM
If you’re interested in seeing some of the more in-depth feats you can accomplish with green screening, check out this “behind the scenes” footage of this finished commercial. Pretty cool!
What about you? Do you ever use green-screens for your job?
If so, how do you use them, and what software / hardware do you use?
Leave a comment below.
Conrad Davenport says
Good intro to Chroma Keying. When I was still at Eagle’s Nest we actually had a wall in an upstairs room that we painted green (you can get paint at Lowe’s, just need it to be a solid color), it helped to reduce the wrinkles and stuff. What we found though from trial and error and reading about it, is that, the color isn’t as important as the lighting and trying to make sure that all of your lighting on the color is full with no shadows as well as having the subject lit from behind as well as the front. We ended up doing this with a couple spare par cans, it worked pretty well. And I believe you can use any color, just green and blue work the best because normally people aren’t wearing those colors. It seems like your fluorescent lighting directly above the screen took care of your lighting issues.
I never really went in and messed with the settings so knowing that I can up the blacks and lower the whites will help out a ton! Thanks!
Andrew Mason says
Good info, Conrad! I’m not strong on lighting stuff, and that definitely makes sense.
You get extra street cred 😉
Blane Young says
Great tutorial!
I think I am going to add this to our training manual for our production team…
We have used Adobe Premiere in the past, but we are currently making the transition from FCE to Final Cut Studio (not the newest version, but the one prior to that).
Andrew Mason says
Thanks!
Marcus Williamson says
Dude that was quick and nice! We have a green screen, but rarely use it because we don’t have AE officially yet (which will change shortly…CS5) I will def look back to this for advice when we rock the 5. Good stuff!
Andrew Mason says
Sweet! Thanks man!
eric says
Chroma keying is tough! i’m still working on getting my lighting perfect i always get the same problem you have where hair and hands look weird.
Conrad Davenport says
Yeah I agree. It’s been a little while since I’ve done it but what I believe we found worked well (but can get rather expensive unless you have stuff laying around) is to use a total of 8 par cans with diffusers. You use 2 angled from the front of the person, 2 angled from the back (both from the top if possible), and then you use 1 coming from each corner of the green screen to light it. Any lighting would probably work, par cans is just what we had lying around. You really just want a steady lighting rig. LEDs probably wouldn’t work that well because of their mix of colors to create white.
Essentially the key is to make sure that your background is nice, bright, and solid. Lighting is important for your person too and to make sure that they seem well rounded on the background, but backgrounding lighting without wrinkles/shadows is absolutely key. If you’re still running into problems, you might want to try offsetting the person that you’re shooting from the background. What I’ve found in doing product photography is that there’s going to be a reflection off of the back onto whatever the subject is. So what happens is you get faint traces of the green or blue or whatever color you’re using in the hair or along the edges because that’s where the ambient light from the back is hitting. Distancing them from the back or ensuring that that ambient light is getting washed out by other light.
Anyways, just some ideas you can try. Should help. If not, sorry! Let me know if it helps with what you’re doing.
Kyle Reed says
Another great tutorial Andrew. This one was very practical and easy to use. I like when churches use this feature to do their announcements, etc…
Andrew Mason says
Thanks man….me too.
We’ve been doing announcements “non-green screen” recently to save production time, but I love how it looks.
PhillipGibb says
Production time and cost. We had to hire a Screen and some kinoflos. Then I would keep trying to hire a camera with 4:2:2 color sampling but kept missing it. Then we’ll shoot 6 months worth of announcement footage. I thought it was a good balance of time and money. You know – light it better and film it well = less time editing. It can look so great. Btw here is the first Green Screen I ever did: http://synapticlight.com/the-first-ten-before/ 😉
Tim Smith says
We use a green screen for all our videos at work but most of the time it’s just with a static background.
I did do one with a video background demonstrating the Ubuntu desktop.
http://www.computeractive.co.uk/computeractive/video/2233238/introducing-ubuntu-desktop
I recorded the screencast first (getting it out of Ubuntu into a Windows friendly format was a bit of a trial and involved the command line) with a script and then did the studio bit.
In the end we had a monitor monitor (is that the right term?!) turned round in the booth so I could see where I was standing in relation to the menus.
The studio sent me their recording and I put the whole thing together in Magix Video Pro X. It’s not Premiere but I was happy with the results and it’s quite easy to learn.
All in all it was great fun, and I’m proud of the results (caveat below) but it just took too much time to be a regular thing.
*caveat…..
And yes, I am aware that I may not have pronounced Ubuntu the right way; one or two people kindly pointed that out on YouTube.
samuelthan says
I’m have currently started out to do this own hobby. It was very fun at first, but being a newbie and didn’t take into consideration about the importance of proper lighting, things went down hill.
But thanks to the good tip here both from this article and comments, i think i’ve level up in green-screen process… will put my knowledge to the test 🙂
Oh yeah…. i’m using Pinnacle Studio HD as a budget start, didn’t have the in-depth feature of AE but it turn out alright
PhillipGibb says
nice one.
I am a Shake user. Maybe one day I’ll delve into AE 🙂
I did a lot of Green Screening a while back for church, someone told me it was too much effort and now we don’t, hmmmm.
The only thing I would have mentioned would have been the use of a rotoscope to cut out the areas I really don’t need to worry about.
good stuf
John says
I have the exact same screen as you have. I like it except for the big wrinkles. I don’t use it that often so it sits rolled up most of the time. Any idea on how to get rid of those? Maybe ironing it out. I always use FCP but does After Effects work better? I don’t think I have ever used After Effects for anything. I’m new to this stuff. Is it pretty much the same as Motion?