300

The movie 300 seems very relevant to this project given that its a movie shot entirely in front of a blue screen. I haven't seen it yet because it hasn't been released in Australia...



Only this particular production has a much larger budget and they can afford a nice foreground set to place their actors upon. Unfotunately I probably won't have this luxury so I'm going to have to think of clever ways around this.

But for now lets look at the second official 300 trailier...

Conclusions based on the test footage taken on Friday 15th

The lighting was definitely too strong and it created a mulitude of problems with spill. The strong lighting was attributed to the hasty set up of the lighting due to one of the volunteers becoming impatient.

The problem was worsened by visible lighting at the top of the frame. The lighting could be easily removed by a mask but the beams of light produced by the glare of the lights added to the key difficulties.

As expected using darker backgrounds creates a better composite because it conceals matte lines and errosion in the boundaries of the subjects. The shots of Guy turned out the best despite his blue hair and this was attributed to having no external lighting in the shot and the fact he was composited against a black background.

I also contacted the E-Emedia Video Technican in regards to the vertical letter boxing issue and the response I got was this:

My best guess is that the editing software is not set up correctly. 
I.E. It is set for DV Pal square pixels and it should be non-square 
pixels. Video uses non-square pixels and stretches them to fit the 
correct aspect ratio. If that is not it, I would need to see the 
original material.

Video Test: Hugh Throwing a Bottle - Bright CGI Background

Now I'm testing to see the effects the brightness of background colour has. As expected a lighter background produces more noticable matte lines.




Here's a rough edit with a darker background - it looks a lot better.

Another video test

Poorest one of the lot...



Definitely too much lighting during that shoot.

Video Test: Hu Tomas

Here's the source footage...



Here's the edited version...



He seemed to receive a lot of spill around his hands which couldn't be removed. I was quite displeased and the result is unsatisfactory.

Video Test: Guy [Extended]

Video Tests: Guy

Here's a test I did on Friday with Guy who had some light blue dye in his hair which I was worried would cause problems, although it didn't really stand out once on video.




Now here's the edited video.



His blue hair hasn't caused too many problems, although it looks like blue spill - but its not!

The real problem is the quality of the source video, because once recompressed it looks even grainer and that ruins the effect. Overall I think its a passable effort however I'd really like a higher quality source of video to work with.

Also bare in mind this is the 5th version of this video, the other 4 versions were almost identical except the composite didn't look as good. I've been tweaking the settings over the past 4 versions to arrive at this.