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Filed under: Cameras •Hardware •Production •

Greenscreen Primer Part 2

I’ve alluded to a few of our capture systems. Here’s the breakdown…

Studio

Camera - F-950, Red, or EX-1 - For our internal shows, we generally use the F-950 or, if we know we will really not being going above 960x540, the EX-1 (we’re 4:4:4 snobs). We have some clients that prefer the Red. It’s also good when we may be shooting a lot of footage. The one big no-no with the Red is shooting Bluescreen: Its compression is very savage to the blue record. In reality, we really could use the EX-1 for almost everything (using the HD-SDI out) but… we have a 950 so… why not use it?

Capture Tool - Final Cut Pro (Red is direct to drive). Final Cut isn’t perfect but it’s serviceable and it’s generally stable (apart from an odd frame dropping issue when the cursor floats over the capture window during 4:4:4 capture - easy enough to avoid). We haven’t really found that we trust any of the other options. We do use Scopebox or Conduit to check the scopes and Conduit to do live key tests (this saves a great deal of upset later).

Capture Interface - Kona 3 Card via either Dual HD-SDI (F-950) or Single HD-SDI (EX-1). Red is direct to Red Drive. We have used both Blackmagic and AJA Kona cards over the last 5 years. We love the Blackmagic products in many areas… but not direct capture. This is for 2 reasons… 1) Blackmagic doesn’t provide an equivalent to the AJA Control Panel. When something isn’t showing up, we can’t see a live update of inputs. 2) Blackmagic, at least when we were testing it, didn’t down convert a live stream. We use this often.

Capture Medium - Hard Drive (uncompressed) (Red Drive or MacPro Internal 3-disk RAID which yields 300 MB/sec with off-the-shelf hard drives). Our standard studio MacPro includes a 3-drive RAID 0. If yours doesn’t, you should consider it. It’s like having a Honda Accord with a Ferrari engine. We call these “Scary RAIDs” for good reason… you could lose everything if they go bad. This doesn’t usually affect us because we have 2-3 copies of everything important. We’re crazy that way.

Situations are often “imperfect” which is exactly when you want to have uncompressed footage. Adding compression the poor lighting already present is a recipe for disaster (actually… more accurately… it was a recipe for disaster).

Remote

Camera - Red or EX-1 (Red is same as Studio) - The Red is a great remote camera for high-quality 4:4:4 capture with small data footprints. The one cost is its weight. Throwing the Red, and often teleprompter gear, on a small tripod (if your head cost less than $5000 - it’s “small”) will often cause unexpected tilts and will, over time, strip the brakes on the head. Hence the use of EX-1s in some cases. And no, we don’t carry expensive O’connor 2060 heads on a plane…that’s what rental companies are for.

Shooting with the RED. You’re probably wondering how we keyed the little car area. Just remember 80% of all composited plates include some Roto…

Capture Tool - Final Cut Pro - See Above.

Capture Interface - AJA IO HD (We’re looking forward to testing the IO Express). The AJA IO HD box is a Swiss army knife of video throughput. We use it to conform signals, capture to MacPros, Capture to Laptops, and even tie together teleprompters. It’s awesome.

Capture Medium - External Hard drive (Apple ProRes). One the road, capturing to Apple ProRes is not as good as full Uncompressed Video but it’s pretty close to even with 4:2:2 Uncompressed and close enough for most uses.

Remote with HV20 - We use Blackmagic Intensity Card with local MacPro via Final Cut Pro. The Blackmagic Intensity Card is the best deal around for capturing high quality footage from consumer cameras (many of which do not compress the HDMI signal). You really can get a broadcast quality signal from an HV20 and an Intensity Card.

So there’s an overview of the codecs and systems we use to capture greenscreen. In Part 3, we’re talk about the actual techniques of capture. If you have comments or questions… fire away!

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Um… where’d part 1 go? The page is empty: http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/pvcpostpipeline/story/greenscreen_primer_part_1/

Posted by node1.me  on  09/16  at  03:31 PM

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Oh. I found it. Here: http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/alindsay/story/greenscreen_primer_part_1/

Posted by node1.me  on  09/16  at  03:33 PM

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ProRes 4444 is working very well (we’re using it currently for a film project).

a

Posted by Alex Lindsay  on  10/05  at  06:08 PM

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Great article!
With ProRes 4444 does capturing uncompressed still makes sense? I heard ProRes 4444 is basically indistinguishable from uncompressed.
And do you think its worth it to bother capturing Cineform on a Mac?

When can we expect part 3?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  02/22  at  10:28 AM

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We’re starting to capture with APR 4x4. I don’t have a definitive decision yet.

Posted by Alex Lindsay  on  02/22  at  11:48 AM

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