Here are some tips and tricks that will help make your Chroma shoot look clean and professional.
There are plenty of technical advantages to using green, your choice should be based on the qualities and obstacles of each specific shot you’re capturing and most of the time blue is found in the shot more often than green.
One of the best ways to learn green screen is to research how it has been implemented in actual movies. You can check YouTube for behind the scenes clips.
The use of green screens has come a long way over the past few decades. Technology that was primarily reserved for Hollywood blockbusters is now utilized by many. Here, we’ll guide you through the entire process of using green screen backgrounds from start to finish.
If you ask any experienced filmmaker what to look out for when using a green screen, chances are they’re going to mention lighting about a billion times and that’s for good
Here are some tips as follow:
- If there’s green in your shot, choose a blue chroma color. If there’s blue in your shot, choose a green.
- Green is twice as reflective as blue, so it tends to contaminate your shot more.
- If your background is blue or green, use those respective colors for your key color.
- Most modern cameras have sensors that use the green channel to carry luminance, so shooting on a green screen could result in twice as many pixels.
- Keep your subject at least six feet away from the green screen. This helps minimize spill and unwanted shadows appearing on the green screen background.
- Light your foreground and your backdrop separately. It is also important to light your green screen backdrop evenly. Proper lighting exposure helps to avoid excess green lighting spill.
- Don’t overexpose the chroma screen – Simply put, a healthy exposure for a typical image just won’t cut it for chroma keying – it will be overexposed.
- The cleaner the screen, the cleaner the key.
- The less you compress, the better the key – Using a format that compresses your video less, like RAW or ProRes, will result in a better key, because it retains the minute details of your image.
- Film with the highest bit-rate/least compressed codec you can. 10-bit color will be superior to 8-bit. ProRes 442 and 444 are always great options and RAW is even better if you have that ability.
- Filming with a faster shutter speed reduces motion blur and helps provide a cleaner key. You can always add secondary motion blur back in during post-production.
- One-click keys – If you’ve done everything right, you’ve chosen the right chroma color, exposed correctly, shot against a clean screen, and chosen the highest possible compression format you can, you should be able to isolate your chroma color in one click when you begin the post process. Every aspect of chroma keying is important, because they all influence the final result.
Hope this helps you in shooting your Chroma setups. Backdrops and Chroma Set-ups available on rent with Paxton Equipments.
