Learning greenscreen hard way......

So this week I tackled the green screen shoot. I learned the hard way that it is super important to get the best plate you can to get the best comp. Here is the original footage:

GreenScreenTest from James Spadafora on Vimeo.

I started with primatte first since that is what we used in class. I really like the step by step process of the toggle however when I moved thru the steps I realized that I was having a real issue with here head. There was all kinds of dark noise close to here hair values. Because of this I was battles to keep the dark wisps of hair while trying to eliminate the noise. This comp did not come out at all. The only way I would be able to easily remove the noise was to re-shoot the shot. I gave the rotopaint a try to draw out a garbage matte however I would need to go in with a tablet every frame and draw it out . I decided jest to re shoot first thing next week or friday becase there was another issue with the footage I will get to later. here was the primatte test:




Next I gave the IBK keyer a try which I did not get to far in because I found that it is a strong keyer if you have a clean BG plate. Pulling a key from IBK would be jest as much work at Primatte with a less intuitive interface. Also I had all the same issues I had with Primatte with the noise around the head.


The last Keyer I used was Keylight. I liked this keyer because I was able to pull a usable key quicker then with primatte. the sliders where a lot more useful and intuitive then the sampling method that IBK and Primatte use. This is by far my favored keyer. I still had all the same issues with the noise and hair however I was able to find a good balance using the black point slider.




There where a few good things that happened in the shoot. My lighing turned out exactly how I imagined it in my mind. I may defuse the red rim a bit but over all I was happy. That intermediate lighting class really paid off. I did not get any spill because I worked far from the screen however this caused the issue with the noise because I was getting the dark areas of the screen which made the noise. To fix this I will drop the intensity of the Keno flows pointing at the screen and work closer. Another issue I had was tracking. The points I put on the screen where to few. as soon as the ladder was out of the shot PFtrack did not has the data it needed to solve the camera. I think I will need to put more points ether on the wall or in the scene to get a good track witch will be important for bringing the scene in and do the set replace.