FCP 4-Green Screen-Ping Richard Brown-MacDV Digest #2271

[Richard Brown]

Aliasing, as far as color correction goes, is very controllable in the 
tweaked 3 Color Corrector, and bodes well if the same controls are 
applied elsewhere, but as to green screen, our primary work on this is 
only about to begin in very large scale shortly. When doing massive 
corrections, however, even on a notch basis, you can affect a few 
pixels unintentionally, and thus matting or other spill control may 
become necessary, but the new ability to blur and feather contrasting 
color edges is spectacular.

Recently, our "effects" work has been limited to 3-D (as in, get out 
your shutter glasses) and various to extreme levels of color correction 
work. In the past, I've worked with Ultimatte on some shows (regarding 
green/bluescreen work) in terms of their live, online, hardware 
solution, but now, Ultimatte has a new DV-oriented software solution, 
which addresses the 4:1:1 problem of DV footage and, given Ultimatte's 
long mastery of the composite, it might be well worth a look for your 
compositing issue.

As it happens, I have just begun work on a sci-fi comedy feature film 
shot using the Canon XL1 and XL1s, and worse yet, shot in that cam's 
pseudo "frame mode," including green screen shots. Given the 
limitations of the XL1, NEVER choose "frame" mode. Create that look in 
POST. This will afford you MORE resolution.

In this feature there are quite a few elaborate CGI shots to produce, 
and a lot of simpler "blaster" type shots, motion tracked element 
replacements, and other things as yet to be determined. We will be 
stretching Final Cut as far as possible, backing things up with After 
Effects and other softwares, farming some of the work out while 
producing much of it in-house. Eventually, we will be doing a daunting 
amount of effects work, and we intend to document the whole process for 
a technical DVD aimed at indie filmmakers.

Our first daunting task on this film is to correct many hours of 
"sync-resistant" audio due to the variable bit rate used by that 
camera. Final Cut's resync feature is useful on the timeline, but 
disallows layback, where the sync drifts out alarmingly. Resampling 
looks to be the best choice. We are looking to do audio post on Digital 
Performer 4, Nuendo, and some other tools. We're doing a 5.1 mix, and a 
Music and Effects (M&E) track for foreign language dubbing, mastering 
on M&K 2510's (highly recommended at 
http://www.mkprofessional.com/mps2510.html) and subs.

Richard Brown



On Monday, June 30, 2003, at 08:27 AM, Ted Langdell wrote:

> Hi, Richard,
>
> Have you had any reason to do green screen from Mini-DV footage?  I'm
> curious to know how that's worked.
>
> I have two projects that make use of green screen to fly people around 
> in a
> concrete pipe.  IF I'm very careful I can get clean edges that don't
> "flutter" due to what appear to be aliased edges around the video being
> keyed.  Takes a bit of time to get right.
>
> Am hoping to have a G5 and FCP 4 by the time I need to post the second
> project and hope that improves things noticeably.
>