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Filed under: Lighting •Production •Visual Effects •

ScopeBox Software with the Reflecmedia LED Green Screen System

I’ve been testing the Reflecmedia LED LiteRing system for about a month now, and it wasn’t until I paired it with the ScopeBox software scope that I finally gained some real control in my shots! These products should be bundled in my opinion, because without a scope, it’s nearly impossible to tell on a preview monitor if you’ve got the correct gain or lighting from your LED LiteRing.

I first got my cue about using a scope from Alex Lindsay, who has also posted an article on shooting green screen here on PVC. He shares the importance of getting the green luminance balanced and centered in the middle of the green spectrum as close as possible to get the best key. I have over-blown some shots, had issues with not enough lumanence in the green channel and just overall poor screen coverage, relying on only the on-camera viewfinder as my monitor in the field! The results of improper balance of lighting the green screen - ESPECIALLY with the projected LED LiteRing, can throw off color balance, saturation and give you an overall horrible key! I’ve even used a balanced field monitor and thought I had a good shot but when I matched the same shot & lighting with a scope, I could see where I was off with both the background lighting and the foreground color balance.

This shot was done without any scope and we had to “guess” at our exposures and the amount of LED light we needed to get the key. We actually under-lit this shot with the LED LiteRing and had to work a bit harder in compositing with Keylight as a result. The built-in keyers in Final Cut Pro couldn’t handle it very well, as the background was too course and noisy. This was no fault of the Reflecmedia system, but only our own, as we didn’t have a proper way to measure this information on-hand.

Shooting without a scope and compositing results.

Notice there is still a bit of an edge around the subject’s shoulders, which would require further masking and matte refinement to resolve without affecting the area around his head. Note that this was also not the optimum setup for shooting a green screen shot, with only a couple of portable hot lights in tight quarters. If I had my portable Kino Flows on this shoot, there would have been a lot more control of the lighting and even without a scope, we could have had better results. But that’s another article altogether!

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Added Note: ScopeBox only requires FCP’s HDV codecs to run, which is why it’s recommended to be installed on the same partition. However, there are non-Apple versions available here for download: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/164630.html

Cheers!
Jeff Foster
http://PixelPainter.com

Posted by Jeff Foster  on  08/12  at  02:11 PM

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