Green Screen on the RED ONE

[Edmund Curtis]

My second post in as many hours.

I'm doing a green screen shoot on the RED in a few days. We have access too all the tungsten lights that we need and a studio with green cyc.

 

My question however is how is the best way to light the green screen effectively. There are several factors that I've been considering

 

1) I have been reading that the RED responds better to green screen when setting WB to daylight? Is this true.

2) Was also reading in another forum that the RED green screen actually responds better when the green screen is overexposed as opposed to being underexposed?

Any other factors that I have missed?

 

Any responses greatly received

[David Mullen ASC]

The RED prefers to be shot in daylight, that's the main thing. So if you have an all-tungsten package, then I'd look into getting some blue camera filters to lift the recorded image away from 3200K to something higher -- any amount of blue is better than none. Halfway is fine, like to around 4800K.

 

Otherwise, I'd proceed like normal in terms of what's best for greenscreen.

 

The noise level of shooting in 3200K light with no correction is probably the main reason someone said to not underexpose the green screen on the RED. But if you use blue camera filters, that problem should be reduced.

 

Setting the WB to daylight without any blue gels or camera filters just means you are recording an orange image because you are lighting with tungsten. That doesn't really help because the WB is just metadata anyway, so it's recording a daylight balance no matter what. But it does mean, if you set the WB to daylight, that when you open up the files using the metadata, it won't automatically boost your blue channel to compensate, to correct the 3200K-lit image, so you may find some better (less noisy) method of correcting the orangey image yourself. And perhaps you'll be able to pull a better key before the correction takes place, even though the greenscreen will have a lot of orange light in it.

 

Or maybe not, which is why it is better to get an image closer to 5600K in the first place.

 

Definitely overall give the image a good exposure to keep the noise level down.

[Edmund Curtis]

Thanks David. I am going to gel up all the lights so that I can shoot at 5600K

Although I was reading in a red forum that you should overexpose the green screen by a stop or 2 seeing as shooting in RAW formate the RED could handle it and it would help as the colour would become more saturated. I'm wondering whether this could be true?

 

A bit worried about it all but with some more research I think it should be Ok and will post the results up here as soon as they are done