Lost Marble Media

We get a lot of jobs that involve keying out backgrounds. More often than not, the client had decided to buy a piece of green material from Ikea and shoot it in the basement. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that to be perfectly honest. Setting up the scene is usually where they mess up. Above is a comparison image. On the left is an actual still from footage we received from a client who had no prior knowledge of setting up a green screen shoot while on the right you can see a capture from a well thought out, professional shoot. Simple mistakes make our job of editing the results a hundred times more difficult and thus it takes us longer, the quality suffers and it costs the client more money. With that in mind, here are some hints, tips & tricks to setting up and filming a successful green screen shoot.

1. Choose green over blue screening whenever possible. Blue screens often bring out jagged edges in your keying results. Green also reflects less than blue.
2. Keep your lighting as even as you can manage. The more solid the color the easier it is to remove in post production.
3. Avoid using sunlight to light your scene (even if you have artificial lighting as well as sunlight). Clouds will change the shade of green in your background and you’ll see patches of green return to your keyed out background.
4. Light each person in your scene individually to avoid them looking like they’ve been filmed separately.
5. A great addition to your lighting setup is a Halo Light, basically, a light that is placed above the subject and positioned slightly behind them.
6. You should try to keep the distance between the subject and the green screen approximately equal to the distance between the subject and camera. This helps to dull shadows.
7. A simple and obvious one: Use a tripod! If you have motion blurs in your shot it’s going to be a long edit trying to properly remove the green when it’s blurred with the subject.
8. Keep your shot clean. No visible cables or monitors and definitely no other people in shot.
9. Another obvious one: DON’T wear green! White is also not a good choice as it picks up some measure of the green surroundings. Ditto with reflective surfaces such as belt buckles. Red will produce a bleeding edge where the green and red blends.
10. Remember that as good as your scene may appear with your eyes, the way the camera sees it is much more important. Manually set the exposure, white balance and focus. It’s best to set up a monitor or laptop with a firewire cable to view the results as your cameras built in LCD screen often displays inaccurate results. Check that what you see with your eyes matches what you see on your preview screen.

Good luck and happy shooting!