We recently had a client in that wanted to run some tests with the F55 on a green screen before taking it out on a shoot. While we had the green screen set up I decided to shoot all of our cameras in front of it to have sample footage for our clients and anyone else who wants to test how well each camera performs against a green screen. All of those clips are available for download at the bottom of this post for you to try out for yourself.
The Setup
The green screen we have used is a bit on the yellow side of the ideal color for a green screen, which can make pulling a good key harder than it would otherwise be. Fortunately we had an ingenious workaround for this potential issue. In the image below you can see our setup.
We used KinoFlo 4′ 4 bank lights to create even lighting on the green screen and used daylight balanced bulbs to cast as much blue on the screen as possible to help mute the yellow coloring a bit.
From there we used a vectorscope on the camera to adjust the white balance point of the camera to achieve the truest green possible, thus eliminating the yellow tinting as an issue completely. You can see a bit of the difference in the monitor just to the left of the camera in the image above.
After that it was simple to adjust the key light, a Fiilex Q1000, to the color temperature setting of the camera to achieve proper color balance on the subject. This workaround made it possible to achieve the best results while using a less than ideal backdrop, and would not have been possible to the degree of precision we achieved without having the flexibility afforded by having a light with an adjustable color temperature with an accurate readout. This method could be further improved upon by using color temperature adjustable lights on the green screen as well.
The Results
Here is a screen cap of the Rec709 FS7 footage before and after applying a key. Pulling the key was quite simple using the built in keying effect in Final Cut Pro X. I just dropped it on the clip and tweaked the color range of the key and cleaned up the edges and achieved the below result in a matter of minutes.
The Camera Settings
All cameras were shot at 24 frames per second with a 1/48th shutter speed. In each clip I made sure to use motion to add blur to the image so you can test how well each camera keys motion blur. The A7’s were shot with a Canon 70-200mm IS II and everything else was shot on a Canon 24-70mm IS II. Exposure for each shot was adjusted so that the green screen registered at 50% on a histogram. All cameras were shot in custom Rec709 and Slog.
The Footage
Here are links to the clips from all of our cameras shot against a green screen. Hopefully you will find them useful and I would be interested to see what kinds of results you can manage off of these sample clips. Post links to your clips in the comments below. I did my best to make sure the tests were as identical as possible given the variety of cameras being used. The files have been uploaded as they originally appeared on the media cards in the cameras.
Update
It should be noted that I am not a green screen expert in shooting or editing. This exercise is not intended as a tutorial on how to shoot green screen, but an opportunity for our customers to get their hands on green screen footage from multiple cameras that was all shot in a consistent manner, which even if not shot in the best way, is at least shot poorly in the same way all around. The write up of our process is for transparency purposes so that you can evaluate how we captured the footage and how that affects the final results when pulling the key.
| A7S II |
| A7SII |
| A7R II |
| A7RII |
| PXW-FS5 |
| 4K Rec709 4K Log HD Rec709 HD Log |
| PXW-FS7 |
| 4K Rec709 4K Log |
| PMW-F55 |
| 4K XAVC Rec709 4K XAVC Log HD XAVC Rec709 HD XAVC Log HD SR SQ 444 Rec709 HD SR SQ 444 Log HD ProRes 4444 Rec709 HD ProRes 4444 Log 4K RAW |
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