NYTimes Article On Making Green Screen Movies With Inexpensive Stuff
Steve K
Posts: 3,226
Just FYI for anybody interested.
"How to Add Hollywood Special Effects to Your Videos
With your smartphone, inexpensive software and a bit of cloth or paper, you can make your own 'green screen' movies."
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great find :)
Thanks. I'm thinking of making my trouble making cat the star of a Carrara SciFi animation. She is checking with her agent.
Sweet! Amazing what we find when we scroll down the page a bit! :)
I have to come back to check out your link. No time right now. But I had a little bit of fun with green screen in VFX class. I was so pumped with learning adrenaline during that course... really worth every second!
So, week four was going to be about green screen compositing, and we were given a little teaser at the end of week 3, so I did a preliminary test using software other than what we were being taught, just to learn.
In this video, we haven't started the week yet. So I messed around in Carrara a bit to 'film' in green screen, then I take the result into (1) Howler and (2) Fusion to try my hand at a green screen composite. Pardon the pun, but I was very green still. Although I've had a little more practice since this, I'm still very green when it comes to it - but I have a great set of VFX tools now - so I'm set.
I must apologize. Since these older video tutorials, I've now learned how to do them in a much more concise way - less babbling and going off topic, less time, more info. But here's my Preliminary video I made for my classmates, who were very interested in the fact that I was doing everything in CG.
And here's the result of my homework asignment for green screen. The actor was shot (filmed) in a car with the door open, in a garage, with a green screen outside his window - and was flimed several ways, smooth and bumpy ride. Then we were given two background plates (Plate = Beauty Pass = Original on-set film) to play with. Oh... and he was also filmed wearing a green shirt in some of them, so we could experiment with green screen compositing while the actor is wearing green.
I don't talk in this one. It's just some quick result of my composites using the software we were being taught to use, HitFilm Express, which is the free version of HitFilm, by FXHome
This one was on Quad Warp compositing, which requires that we use "Tracking" and perpective to put one film onto a surface within the final film. In this case, I put the first week's homework on the upper screen on the computer console.
This one is 32 minutes of me compositing different takes of the same few actors over the same beauty pass environment to create a whole mob of people. The technique is called... you guessed it: Mobs or mobbing.
EDIT: Oh, and I used Howler on this one, just because I'm so comfortable using Howler.
Much later, in the Post You Renders thread, I used compositing techniques to add smoke and flames to one of Magaremoto's renders :)
Ungh! Damn, this one is ultra-cheesy! Maybe it's because I'm from Wisconsin?
Dartanbeck - Sounds like you really got into it. The NYTimes article is very much beginner level, based on " ... a smartphone, inexpensive software ($2-3) and a bit of cloth or paper ... " I have to add my trusty "Movie Edit Pro" had nice features in this area, and while I haven't done anything like this in my new Vegas Pro (now owned by the same company, Magix), I'm pretty sure it will do anything I can dream up. Its nice when the limitation is your own imagination, rather than the tools.
Interesting article! I am amazed that they didn't mention Fusion or HitFilm Express as Free (and yet very good) PC/MacOS apps for this. But it's cool to now learn of more that are out there.
Now, at the beginning of the article, she says to use Strong lighting to avoid shadows, wrinkles, etc., In VFX class, the instructor gave examples of how to light the green screen independently from the actor, so it's common to have a good bit of distance between them. Also try and make sure that the green screen (and it being lit) doesn't spill green light onto the actor, etc.,
HitFilm (ooops, I mean FXHome) has some awesome VFX tutorials to watch on their YouTube channel.
For example, this is a Star Wars fan film they made to showcase the free version of HitFilm (short. 2:45)
Here is the playlist of how to make it in HitFilm Express
Years ago I saw a YouTube video where a guy used the sky as his blue screen
Sorry to hit this thread so hard.
This is the new (well, version 16 is now in beta) DaVinci Resolve 15 traing tutorials playlist. Amazing! This is what I'm learning now, having picked up all of the text book traing courses for it. Amazing! These videos alone are an incredible learning tool for one exquisite software package. I'm almost as excited about this as I am about Carrara!
DaVinci Resolve 15 Training - by Blackmagic Design (Australia)
This is a half hour live presentation by Grant Perry of Blackmagic Design introducing new products including DaVinci Resolve 15. Pretty cool stuff for broadcast/filmmaker enthusiasts
Makes me really want to buy a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema camera!!! :)
In this one, he (Grant) takes us on a history tour of broacast equipment to help explain how they developed the awesome new hardware (which is amazing) and also introduces the incredible updates done to DaVinci Resolve 16 beta, and then introduces the killer new Resolve keyboard they're coming out with this year. This one's a little over two hours long, but I loved it!
Oh yeah... Vegas Pro will Rock literally ANY project you want to dream up! Awesome freaking software, that!
Yeah... between that and family matters is what kept me too long from making Daz products, so I'm no longer a PA. I studied really hard and did a lot of practicing and research. I'm still learning this stuff, and you find that study is one thing, but we really need to practice it to get it right. Like in my examples above, I didn't show the next many steps to take to actually incorporate the composite into the actual shot, so it still looks very CG (beyond her being CG! LOL). There are a lot of things we need to do, like introduce something that photographers avoid - light spill, and other effects and grades to make it all look like it was all shot at once, on one film.
LOL!!!
I'm just going off, typing and pasting all this stuff - then I thought... oh... I better check to see if there are any other posts! LOL
Sure enough... there you are!
SteveK, having Vegas Pro, won't need to look elsewhere, I don't think. I don't have Pro, just an older (Sony) version of Vegas Movie Studio, which I really like. But Movie Studio doesn't have the VFX capabilities, which is why I was looking into Howler, HitFilm, and Fusion.
I'm not sure if Vegas Pro has full VFX implementation, but it wouldn't surpise me if it did. Here's a quick intro video for Vegas Pro 16
I'm not even sure if Fusion (standalone) is Free anymore. If it is, it could make for an excellent VFX tool to add for anyone needing some extra FX processing. HitFilm is also a great choice for this, and is laid out more like a "layers" (photoshop) app, where Fusion is node based, which is actually more efficient for post, since any element in the chain can be used, and then used again by another process, etc., simply by connecting it to more things.
I'm not sure what Vegas Post is, but it looks like it's what SteveK has, since it appears to be the culmination of FXHome (HitFilm) and VegasPro, all under one roof, which is what he has.
If any of you have an interest in this sort of thing, here is a cool quick example video of how some of the most common uses of Fusion are done within DaVinci Resolve, even if we then export the results into Vegas or Cyberlink, or whatever
Here's the cool short movie they're working on in the demo
If layers are more your thing, let's take a look at HitFilm. For this example, we'll look at an older version of HitFilm simply because the tutorial is done by my VFX in HitFilm instructor, Simon Jones, and I really like this particular lesson to introduce folks to compositing.
First, here's Ryan Connolly of Film Riot, and the director of this short film, Portal Combat, explaining a bit about the Portal effects (very briefly and he can talk really fast!)
...and here's Simon taking us down to the original beauty pass and building the custom portal effects Ryan just mentioned, in HitFilm. I should point out that this is easily still done in newer versions of HitFilm, which is why this video is still cool. HitFilm keeps getting better and better, while the interface remains recognizeable to this one
Cool, eh? And simple too! But it does take practice. Theory goes a long way, but it's amazing how easy it is to forget stuff without having piles of experience.
Let's look at the short film they're working on, Portal Combat (short)
Awesome!!!
The little girl is Ryan's sister, and the guy with her (eating the chips) is their brother. Film Riot is an awesome channel for filmmaking advice and inspiration.
Here's the playlist for this project, which shows editing techniques/advice, muzzle flash composites, and more
Those are great examples Dartanbeck. I bought a copy of HitFilm Pro a few years ago to replace After Effects...but old habits die hard and I just keep using the same tool I know. It's been a few years now since I have done any green screen work. I have a friend who is a puppeteer here in Tucson, he lived with me for many years and I was his assistant for his shows and we sort of fed off each creatively. For a short while I really got into filming his puppets and incorporating them into 3D enviornments, but eventually he nixed future projects because he didn't like the way they looked on video. He was much more into the 'live' in your face aspect of his shows, which I understood. But I learned a lot along the way. I posted this a few years ago, but thought I'd post the link again since the subject came up:
I would echo what that NY Times article said - make sure your green screen is as flat as possible, keep your subject well separated from the background screen, light the screen as evenly as possible (minimum of two lights, one from each side), light your foreground subject with separate lights, keep shadows off the screen...ummm....create a 'core matte' and an 'edge' matte and combine the two...and, if your software can do it, create a tight junk matte, as tight as possible. Here is a link to an article on "Super-Tight Junk Mattes" in After Effects, but maybe can be interpolated for other compositing apps:
Edit to say: my examples aren't perfect and have their own flaws.
Very cool!