It’s the morning after the day before – Prokit’s amazing ‘Three Wise Men’ event. A great crowd, lots of interesting discussion.
The general idea was to bring together Andy Bell’s lighting workshop looking at 1-up and 2-up interviews, Chris Woolf’s in-depth investigation into wind and mechanical noise, and I’d round up with a quick look at lighting for chromakey, specifically matching the background plate.
Andy’s hands-on workshops are a lot of fun – ‘what can you do with two lamps and a given programme style?’ but with the constraints of time and space, Andy took us through lighting plots that moved a step or two beyond ‘3 point’ setups plus a few little tricks too.
I hope to see a recorded version of Chris’s presentation soon, as I only caught bits of it from the back. Chris is Rycote’s Technical Consultant, and therefore the depth of detail was great – definitely required taking notes, though.
There were two bits of information in my presentation that I promised to publish post-event and so here they are:
Firstly, GreenScreener – a very useful app for iOS and Android from Per Holmes and Hollywood Camerawork:
http://www.hollywoodcamerawork.us/gs_index.html
It’s so important to get an even light on the background, whilst not pouring too much light, and this app makes it falling-off-log easy to adjust lamp position, intensity and flagging to make it work.
Secondly, a great video from Eve Hazelton and the team from Realm Pictures, plus a follow-up on keying in AfterEffects with its built-in Keylight plug-in (similar in scope to the FCPX keyer we demonstrated on the day).
Richard Payne from Holdan had bought a very new toy in – still in beta. This was a ‘live’ chromakey solution, with HD-SDI, HDMI or DVI inputs for foreground and background, plus output. We’d got it working behind the scenes, but it developed ‘demo nerves’ just as we were setting up and so we skipped it. However, initial tests looked really good and so hopefully we’ll get to do a more in-depth chromakey press which includes both live and post keying another time.
For what it’s worth – and probably the most valuable part of this post? How to pack away your Lastolite pop-up background:
Travelling Matt 