Chroma for Dark/Night background

[Anonymous]

i will be supervising a chroma shoot where the background would be dark or maybe a night shot.

any suggestions. last time i shot i got lots of spills since i could not easily key out the green. and it was quite visible on dark background.

[claudio antonelli]

I just finished up a shoot that I supervised for a similar situation. In my situation we lit the greenscreen a stop over the subject.

While I did get good keys, (and if you have a lot of darks in your foreground you can get some really nice edge detail due to the green being so bright) I also spent a lot (a LOT) of time getting edges not to glow because of the brightness of the screen. I think that’s always gonna be the doom of night greenscreens, but being a stop over subject didn’t help.

this page
http://www.fischeredit.com/post/green/
recommends lighting the screen at or just below the talent, which I would say is a great rule of thumb.

As for spill, get that screen evenly lit. Be a complete prick about it. I mean, do it nicely, but the whole point of a greenscreen shoot is to make something workable for the VFX team. Don’t judge by the monitor, meter the whole thing and make sure it’s within 1/3 a stop of itself. The closer the better. An even screen will separate much better from it’s spill than a poorly lit one.

[Author]

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