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Filed under: Cameras •Post Production •Production •Training •

The RED Camera and Green Screen

After working in this business a while (this year was 21 for me) I find that I don’t worry about venturing into the unknown. And three weeks ago green screen with the RED was certainly an unknown for me.

It’s been a tough sell getting the RED camera on paid jobs. Up until recently every job I’ve used it on has been unpaid, either shooting freebee spots for the California “No on Prop 8” campaign or the spec Wii spot I shot back in April for my reel. But last month I finally got it on a real gig: a five day project for solar energy mega-company Sunpower.

I haven’t had many problems at all with the RED, and I had no fear taking it on location for three days. The one area of concern, though, was the day-and-a-half of green screen material we were to shoot for a Flash web site. I hadn’t shot green screen on the RED, and the only information I had at the time as to how well green screen worked with the RED was anecdotal: some of it good, and some of it very, very bad.

Fortunately we built in some test time while pre-lighting the stage, and in this article I’m going to show you what I found. Before I start, though, a word about methodology.

I wanted to retain the accuracy of the images all the way from output via RedAlert through to the web, and I think I’ve done a reasonable job. All images were output as 16-bit DPX files. The color channel separations were handled by Photoshop CS3’s “split channel” command. The enlargements are pixel-for-pixel blowups of 4k RED footage, which means that instead of zooming into the footage I merely captured a 619-pixel slice of each 4k image without doing any resizing. (619 pixels is our standard image width for article pictures here at PVC.) The only resized images are the wide shots, which are full-frame reductions. And I used as little compression as possible when converting the images from DPX to JPEG for the web.

First, let’s sit around the fire and share anecdotes about the RED and green screen…

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Well done article.  Your articles are always informative and make potentially difficult topics, easy to understand.

Posted by  on  11/04  at  06:18 AM

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Did you place the 80D filter on the camera or on the light source?

I’ve often seen the green screen lit with one set of instruments and the talent lit with another. If the green screen is lit so it’s instruments do not spill onto the talent, would you then light with green on the screen and white light on the talent?

Peace,

Rob:-]

Posted by Rob  on  11/05  at  11:46 AM

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You said, “… the 80D was half the correction of an 80D filter ...”. Is there a typo in here?

Peace,

Rob:-]

Posted by Rob  on  11/05  at  11:47 AM

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Please clarify a couple of points:

When you say “full body shots” are you referring to the seeing of skin tones on your subject ? Is that your concern ?

If that is the case then why not just make sure that there is no contamination of the subject by the light illuminating the
Green screen ?  Would using Super Green Kinos or a Lee green on your tungsten lights significantly improve the key ability of the screen ?

I have lit hundreds of green screens for films, Keeping green
contamination off the foreground subjects is simply a matter of light control and having a large enough space/greenscreen to
keep the subject far enough away from the screen to make sure
that there is no bounce spill.
I would light the green screen to its best keyablity and then light the subject to the proper ratio of screen to subject in terms
of over/under stop wise.
I would much prefer to gel my lights than to filter my lens because when I filter my lens I am affecting not just the green screen but also my subject.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding , again my experience is primarily with film. We are starting to be questioned about whether the RED is a viable option for some of our work.
thanks-J

Posted by  on  11/15  at  09:47 AM

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Great article Art!

Posted by  on  11/22  at  03:40 PM

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