Re: Advice on Lighting for Video

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007 00:06:33 -0400, nobody special wrote
(in article <1180670793.211499.56770@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

You can find out a lot by going to sites like videouniversity and
DV.com and checking their archived articles, forums and threads on the
subject. Frankly, your room is probably too small for chromakeying
anything but a close-up head and shoulders shot. It will also get
stifling hot in minutes unless you add ventilation fans which are
noisy, or use flourescent lighting. To do chromakey right you need the
background lit very evenly all over, and no shadows thrown on it by
the talent. Then you light the talent separately, so the style and
look of his lighting match the new background to be inserted. The
small size of your room limits how well you can do this. You can try
shooting diagonally across the room to get a little more separation (I
would say six feet easy between you and the wall, then add six feet or
so for the distance between talent and camera), or even open the door
and put the camera out into the next room to get the distance you
need. If you try to sit or stand right next to the cloth or paper
backdrop, your results will stink.

Don't waste your money on the LED based ringlight chromakeying system,
that thing works but will cost you many times more than simple paint
or cloth, and it has other problems in certain situations.


I've seen reflecmedia's system work very nicely. Everything has a problem in
certain situations. Your caveats above prove this is true for "old school"
implementations. The reflecmedia demo was pretty astounding. R&R lighting in
Silver Spring hosted it. They were also impressed.

We were standing 2-3 feet in front of the screen. Shadows were not a problem.
Seeing reflections of the blue or green LEDs in the on camera talent
eyeglasses was possible with ECU, but not so much otherwise.

We didn't need a 12-15 foot deep stage. We didn't need to light the
screen...at all.

Regards,

Ty Ford

--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RZJ9MptZmU

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