Greenscreen Bluescreen

LloydTheGreat

LloydTheGreat

Hi everyone,
quick post,

Does anyone know where I can buy bluescreen / greenscreen materials on the web/mail order/wherever ?
I have tried and tried with green/blue fabric and sheets but to no avail, its just not giving good enough results.

I found some at http://www.jessops.co.uk
(search for chroma)

But they seem very expensive for what they are, anybody know of any cheaper alternatives ?

Thanks :)
 
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You can buy Rosco video ultimatte paint in green or blue at any cinema supply store, if you have a free wall or a sheet of canvas you want to paint.
 
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www.rosco.com

You can also look up the Pantone colours for green/blue and take them to a Home Depot (not sure what a Welsh equiv is) or large paintshop and have them mix up some paint in the "correct" shades. (This is very cheap)

Painting walls/stages is a pretty permanent deal, and not at all portable, though.

PANTONE 2735 - blue screen
PANTONE 354 - green screen

You have smooth lighting, btw? That is probably more important than an exact shade of green, 'cause if you have shadows of varying intensity floating all over the backdrop, that means lots of different shades for the chroma-picker to work with.
 
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ah no no no.
I worded the question wrong, i dont want to use paint.

What i meant is that ive tried using regular green fabric that ive bought from fabric shops but its just too thin and doesnt do a very good job.
What i meant is that i wanted to find a place where i can find proper chroma sheets with the exact right pure green/blue colours on them.

Thanks.
 
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http://www.rosco.com/main.html

Products >> Film/Video >> Digicomp >> Digicomp Fabric

(Or if you don't want it by the bolt, harrass your local camera shop to carry it and sell it by the foot)

Or... get some decent fabric of a suitable thickness... and paint it. (Rosco suggests that their Ultimatte paints work on fabric just fine... I've never tried)

Here is a page about how someone did theirs using plastic tablecloth...

http://www.jushhome.com/Bluescreen/Bluescreen.html

(I tried plastic tablecloth once... reflected way too much light. Might be okay outdoors on sunny day)

Here are some smaller chroma backdrops for sale...

http://www.ladder-games.com/perl/b-ff2011 30079 Chroma Key Blue Green Twist Flex Backdrop.htm

...and another board suggests backing all green cloth fabrics with a black one, to eliminate light bleeding through.

Lots of stuff on Google, btw, using greenscreen fabric as search-term... with several ads on the right side of the screen, too.

:shock:
 
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>>I tried plastic tablecloth once... reflected way too much light<<

Yeah thats the biggest problem with such material. What you need is a material that will disperse light as evenly as possible. I'm not sure how that guy got away with his bluescreen unless he did some serious rotoscoping and/or didn't bother lighting the screen.... odd.

I have some green fabric I have been meaning to try but I haven't done so yet. Maybe I'll rig something up and try it in a few minutes. Now I'm curious :D.

Tine: With todays compositing tools yes any color will technically be keyable. However, the purest greens and blues will still yield best results (or pure reds, etc...)

Lloyd: What program are you going to be using for compositing? I only ask because a true "chroma key" can be rather hard to work with. It's nice to have some other options such as "color difference" as well.
 
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Ah no problem then :). Combustion is some nice software.

Just so long as you light decently (take it outside during a diffuse/cloudy day and you won't need to light the screen) you won't have any trouble keying with that software. I've seen great keys pulled from some pretty bad DV footage that keyed wonderfully with Combustion and/or After Effects.
 
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I just nipped out to Party City.

Kiwi-green plastic tablecloths (40 sq ft) are $1.00 :shock:

They also had uncut rolls of the sheeting, to trim to your own length.

I bought 6 of them (need some more for sunday parties anyway). I'll do something with one of them tomorrow morn, and see how it goes, against the outside of my garage.
 
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:shock: Holy...

Be sure to let us know how that goes. If I can get that much material for that cheap (that actually works decently) I might have to go find myself a Party store.
 
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Sunny California days... hate them. Couldn't start 'til 4pm, when the sun was well on the far side of the house, making a nice long cool shadow.

Put up a double layer of plastic tablecloths. A single layer was darkened by the wood of the garage behind it. The sheets had a different texture on each side. One side had lots of raised bumps (and was very shiney), the other had depressed bumps. Still a bit shiney, but a lot less.

The "kiwi-green" has a fair amount of red in it, from playing with the colour controls.

I bet you could use this inside if your lights were diffused enough.

Came out a lot better than I expected. :shock:

$1 for each 54" x 108" sheet. (Used 2 sheets to get the green "solider")
 
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Nyuk nyuk nyuk
smiley_badger.gif
 
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Sure, need 20 mins or so to crush it.

And upload it! Squished it to 360x240, but did not compress much. (Looks a bit cleaner at 720x480, though)

First off, I put up another tablecloth. (Already had removed the other two). Gives an indication on how much a single sheet can cover. It is over a two-car garage door, slapped up with staples.

Steve's Fancy Garage

Next, we get to say hi to my mum, who popped over for a cup of tea earlier today. Was still playing with single poly at this time.

Hello, Steve's Mum!! (9mb for 12 second duration)

Then, plopped her into the alley that runs behind my house. The alley is a lot brighter than the first location. (No longer in shadow, with heat-waves rising up).

Mum In Alley (13mb for 11 second duration)

Cut red & green by 10% and added a "Camera Blur", whatever that does, to foreground & background. You can see reflected green on her glasses when she waves them, and on the screen's right side you can see a bit of non-match, but that's pretty good for all natural lighting I think.

Used the colour-picker in Premiere 6.0 to chroma the green. Worked much better than the keying effects in my ancient copy of AfterFX 4.1

Could look a lot better if I bothered scaling the two layers... and had let her do her hair... and not used gray hair at all... and made sure the top-right corner was fully covered... and... well, not bad for a dollar. ;)
 
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Not bad at all for $1! I'm rather impressed actually... If you were to color match both layers, add some lighting effects, and some blurring of the edges you would have a really decent green screen. What camera did you shoot this with?
 
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An old Digi-8 (DCR TRV-750)

Too many anomolies outside to easily match the the layers, especially when the moving sun is providing the only light.

I'll nip back to Party City this weekend and try out the other two shades of green that they have. With controlled lighting. Last time I tried poly green I had no clue about diffused lighting... probably why it came out so miserable, with shiny white blobs reflecting all over.

May still be better to spring a few extra beans for good green paint (not a lot at Home Depot, at all) but a relatively good, extremely cheap, portable & dry insta-fake is worth knowing about.
 
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