Green screening with mini-dv camera…
Today, I’ve been messing around with my green screen studio as I prepare to use it for the first time for a commercial. It seems mini-dv cameras aren’t the best choice of cameras to use for green screen. Mini-dv cameras compress the video signal quite substantially which adds artifacts around edges. These artifacts are really difficult to to get around when keying out the green screen. Take a look at the frame grab of some video I shot. Look at the edges between my pants and the green screen background. You can see all the artifacting. There are ways to get around this but it’s messy. The best way is to use a camera that doesn’t do this type of compression. In the digital realm, the best ones are digibeta cameras made by Sony. There may also be hope for HD cameras that send uncompressed video to HDMI ports (however, HDV cameras that only record to tape will have the same problems). Pros also use real film cameras and then telecine the footage to an uncompressed video format. However, if you’re stuck with mini-dv like I am, there are ways to work around this to a point. Take a look at some of these tutorials at CreativeCow. To pull it off, you’ll need Apple Shake though. The keying tools in apps like Final Cut Suite are just not powerful enough.  I’ll be posting more information on what I did specifically for this shot tomorrow.
Posted by g1powermac under Filming | Comments Off