camera settings for greenscreen shooting?? « Videomaker Community Forums

glasshalffull
Member

I'm going to be shooting video against a greenscreen and adding in my Digital Juice ideas. I'll be using DV rack 2.0 to my laptop where I'll be editting in Vegas 7.0. I need to know how I should set my Canon ELura 100 to any specific settings. I'm new to shooting video and do not have the knowlegde of setting up a camera for any type of shooting circumstances.

Shotting for DVD production, using a shotgun mic with rode minimic microphone. Some of these clips will be used on the web on my site and on YouTube as well.

Can someone help?

thanks

Posted 4 years ago #
On a Roll
Member

Hey glass,

The Elura is a good camera for a consumer 1CCD model, but it might pose some challenges to chromakeying. Still, I think you can pull it off. Here are a few ideas.

-Record directly onto your computer. If you record onto a MiniDV tape first, and then transfer it onto the PC, depending on the processor in the camcorder (I'm not totally familiar with the Elura) you might get a lot more color compression than if you directly recorded onto your PC. Plus, it saves you the time of dubbing it onto your computer later!

-Get a good white balance. If I recall correctly, the Elura 100 lets you do a custom white balance. Do this. If you leave it on auto WB, your camera might try to compensate for the over-abundance of green and wash out your color.

-Slightly oversaturate colors on your footage. 1CCD cameras are notorious for having less than vibrant colors, and by saturating your colors a bit more, you'll get more color separation from the green to the rest of you.

-Don't wear anything even remotely green! On a 3 CCD camera, the camcorder can differentiate shades of green, and you can get away with hues with some green. A 1CCD camera like yours is recording Red, Green, and Blue on one chip, giving you the illusion of other colors. Anything even remotely green may trigger when you key out the green, and the last thing you want is to be splotchy. In fact, I'd almost try to stick to colors that aras far away from green as possible (Reds, purples, some blues).

Last but not least, get as farr away from your background as possible. Any shadows or uneven lighting on your screen will show up in post. Stay far enough away so you can't see any shadows on the screen, and if you can shallow up your depth of field enough to slightly blur the greenscreen, it will help even out the back for keying later.

Posted 4 years ago #
glasshalffull
Member

wow Jim, thanks for your super advice. I have a new laptop with 2.2 dual core, 2 gb ram loaded down so it should work well with what you're mentioning if I record directly to the laptop. I hope to use Ultra 2 for the greenscreen stuff as well.

THanks you're a lifesaver for a "green" rookie who's under the gun to meet a deadline.

Jason

Posted 4 years ago #
glasshalffull
Member

trying to figure out how to record directly to the laptop. The instruction book for this camera shows recording to dv tape or memory card and the cam has a swith between the 2 options. It does have an AV plug along with audio plug.

any help would be apprciated

Posted 4 years ago #
On a Roll
Member

Well, with both Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere Pro, you can just plug the camcorder into the firewire port and turn it to "camera" mode. Then it will feed the live audio/video to the editing software, and you just hit the start recording button when you want to start.

Posted 4 years ago #