RED Epic and Live Chroma Keying for Godzilla-like effect

[David McDonald]

I'm shooting a music video very soon and basically the concept behind it is the performer will be like a giant or godzilla walking around the city....and the plan is to shoot a bunch of empty plates of the city and whatever else we want to comp him into, and then on a separate day shoot the performer in front of a green screen and try to match the angle and perspective of the performer in front of the green screen to the angles of the plate we already shot.

 

So what I would like to do is somehow be able to connect the camera to a macbook pro and overlay the plate of the city with the live green screen shot and put it at half opacity to see if the perspective is correct. I've looked into a few programs that do live chroma keying, I think I might just use Veescope since it's fairly cheap and should get the job done. But I don't even know if it's possible to connect the RED Epic to a computer to do this. As far as I know the only input I can think that would work to connect a macbook pro to an Epic is the HDMI,since the camera has an HDMI input and the macbook pro has a mini display to HDMI connection......but I'm not exactly sure what would happen once those are connected....would the macbook pro become a mirrored display of the camera?

 

I've never done anything like this so I may have it all wrong....does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing or can think of a good way of pulling off what I'm trying to do? If I can't do some kind of live monitoring, I may just have to resort to eye-balling the perspective by putting the macbook pro next to the monitor and try to get it as close as possible, which could work, but it would be nice to get it a bit more exact.

[Phil Rhodes]

^{Usually this would be done in standard def using a composite output from the camera and the computer, and a basic domestic/industrial vision mixer such as a Panasonic WJ-AVE5 or WJ-MX50, both of which are now made out of purest unobtainium as they've been out of production for years and are critical to certain kinds of work.}

I've done quite a bit of it. Does the epic have some sort of composite out on it? Can you convert the macbook to composite? If so, you're set if you can get a mixer. Of course it'll look rough as hell but you'll have the reference you need for perspective and framing. The only wrinkle is how the images are framed and the aspect ratio - whether the standard def feeds are widescreen or 4:3, and how the active picture area appears inside that area. Probably you will be able to futz this with the macbook, scaling and shifting the image (even just in Photoshop) to suit the image from the camera.

 

 

You were considering having someone to do this for you, right?

 

P

[Robert Houllahan]

The Epic has HD-SDI output (no analog) you could get a new Macbook-Pro with Thunderbolt and use something like the Blackmagic Ultrastudio 3D to get the feed from the camera into the laptop and then use an app to do a live key to check. I am not sure what app to use but I think the Blackmagic live key app which is bundled with any Blackmagic card/box will do it.

 

 

-Rob-