Lights, Canon 5d and green screen.

[5knightsproductions]

I'm shooting a film soon with a Canon 5d Mark II and most of it will be done on green screen. I just want to do it carefully because I've heard a few bad things about DSLR and green screen.
So what would be the very best lighting to use to light the screen? What types of lights should I use?

Thank you very much!!

 

[gpforet]

While the type of lights is a factor, more important is to have the sceen lit in such a way as to keep shadows off and have it lit uniform from top to bottom. We recently shot on green screen and most difficult was lighting the bottom where it curves onto the floor. For us this meant top and side lighting upstage of the actors, and lighting the actors separately with less intensity than the screen was getting. All told, I think we had something like 14 fixtures being a combination of Arri 1ks, and halogen washes.
Even with all this light, to keep shadows off the screen, we had the actors at least 5 ft. downstage from the vertical part of the screen. We were shooting on a 30' wide screen with a vertical curve at the foor and it's amazing how small it is, and how limiting your camera angles are when the actor has to stay that far downstage. Given the chance to do it again, we would probably go with at least 40' wide. Understand that this was to support a completely virtual set, not just green sceening in an object.
We were shooting with the 60D.

 

[PaulGriffith]

Yes, nice soft lighting for the BG, then foreground you need to light to match the plate your keying on top of.

Keep in mind that if almost all of it is going to be chromakeyed, a DSLR isn't your best choice. The big DSLR benefit is shallow DOF, which is a little pointless in chromakeying. Also, the color depth of the compression it uses is awful. You can key it, we have and others have too, but it won't be as clean as a camera with a better codec.

 

[wheatgrinder]

capturing sharp edges is "key" to good keying.

With a DSLR its EASY to get a nice shallow DOF, which if you focus on the eyes of the subject, might put the outline of the rest of the head or body a bit out of focus, and thereby blurring the edges, which makes for a semitransparent edge which is harder to key.

Youll want to light well, or whatever, to be able to STOP DOWN your lenses in order INCREASE the DOF (deeper focus)

check focus on the EDGES if possible. Obviously its a give an take, just be wary of extreme shallow DOF..

 

[5knightsproductions]

wow thanks for the tips! this is really useful information.

If DSLR is that awful, what type of camera would you suggest? Which has a better codec?

 

[wheatgrinder]

OH, its not awful. Its great. Why I have a DSLR over a 35mm adapter is so that I CAN get DEEP focus. It just that most folks new to DSLR are all hot on the shallow DOF thing.. and in greenscreen case its not the right technique.


That said, I believe people serious about greenscreen prefer 3 CCD video cameras over CMOS based ones.


(edit: whops just saw pauls post.. nevermind)