Snowy Bluescreen Test

After many failed attempts at getting my green screen to key correctly, I made the switch to blue screening. Here is my first test with the new blue screen, and I'd say it's pretty sucessful.

ttoe-blue_screen_test.avi (DIVX)
ttoe-blue-screen-test.mov (Sorensen 3)

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I did the chroma key in After Effects 5.5, the particle systems (snow, mist) in 3ds Max 5, and the background in Terragen. And I composited the entire scene using AE 5.5.

--t.toe

EDIT: Oh, and as for the clip itself, I shot it without having any idea what I was going to do with it, hence the reason he's wearing short sleeves in the snow.

 

Oh, and as usual, I recommend you view the DIVX version if you can, thanks to the far superior compression.

 

Pretty cool, although you could use some colour correction coz the whole thing looks a bit too light. The compositing is great, forgot it was bluescreen for a sec You remind me of Carl from Starship Troopers, btw...

Carl

 

if you could find some way to add a light snow buildup on the guy (i assume it's you)'s arms and head it would make it much more realistic and would be really cool!

 

yes, it was good, and as he said, he filmed it and didn't know what it would be used for and if it was used for a movie, he would somehow get snow on the guy's clothes and head and stuff, and great job!

 

You really do look like Carl in Starship Troopers lol..anyway...I wanted to ask you if bluescreen is really better than greenscreen? My mom let me have a whole room for me to paint it blue/green , it will be a blue screen room i guess..but i just wanted to be sure that blue would be better...
and the second question would be...Did you make the snow using a particle system in 3ds max...???

I really liked the clouds behind ya...I guess thats after fx noise??

And yeah...Good keying

 

i have heard that greenscreen is better than bluescreen, but i don't know of any differences other than the color, my friend told me greenscreen is easier to work with, not sure how. my mom also said i could have a big room for blue/greenscreening but she also said my little sister could have the same room for gymnastics and that my brother could have it for his library and that my older sister could have it for exercising machines. so, who knows if i will ever get it.

 

that's no fair, my computer's broken and even when it worked it was in no condition for editing (350 mHz, ohhh yeeeaaahhh) and my parents wont even by a new one (it's not like it would even be just mine) let alone give me a room to paint blue/green.
sheesh

 

AWB..A friend of mine..painted his basement in green..and we tryed at least.10 times i think to key us..and we never got it right..there was always a place we couldnt key..So i think i'll bluescreen the room i got

 

My experience was the exact opposite Deleted, neither is wrong, I think it really just depends on the subject matter. My lead character was a brunette with a purple/blue cape, which was a 'mare to key on a bluescreen, but considerable easier against green (both tonally - hair, and hue - cape colour. )

Maybe look at the subject you are shooting, and make a judgement call from that.

 

yeah, few answers to your questions:

1) actually, that's not me. it's my film partner... and he gets that "you look like doogie howser" all the time... hehe.

2) the reason blue screening works better for my purposes is that both me and my partner have lighter hair (mine's blonde and his is dirty blonde), and green is way too close in the color spectrum to yellow to make an effective chroma key.

3) thanks for all the kind words. i have another project in the works, and i can't wait to show you all that one...

--t.toe

 

Hey, Very nice, Very Clean compostiting.

You think you could send me the snow file? So I can screen it into stuff?

 

Wow, amazing keying there! Is it possible to show us a short video or at least a picture of your original footage, I´d really like to see your bluescreen. Haven´t seen such sharp and detailed edges.

 

Wow- OK, now I'm totally bummed cause I've been working hard on getting a good key using a blue screen wall in my garage and I'm not anywhere close to what you've done. I've got TONS of blue spill that I can't seem to get rid of without AE spill suppressor turning the outlines of my actors purple, and I get so many jagged artifacts around the edges of my actors that they end up looking like they were made out of legos. I've experimented with different lighting setups, different keying colors, different actor placements and I'm not making much headway.

What camera did you use and how did you light it? Did you just use the color difference keyer in AE?

Later-

Jeremy

 

That?s a very nice key. If you don't mind, I took a screen capture from your animation and did a little " tweaking " to it to see how it would turn out.

Snowy Mountain Test

Here are a few things I tried:

1) I blurred the edges around the foreground character to help him blend with the background a little more.

2) I blurred the background image to account for Depth of Field

3) I did a little color correction to help the foreground character better match the light of the background.

4) I added a light wrap effect to help blend the composite.

All done in After Effects in about an hour or so.

Hope this helps. Your original key was great! Keep up the good work

 

Jason, welcome to the forum, if you start off like this, I'm sure you'll find it a great place. Just be sure to socialize some too, if your jumping into action straight away means anything...
Great pic, I like the slight shift to blue tones on T-toe, thats just what a character in snow would look like, colour matching surroundings a bit more and a slight blurriness, I like it!

Carl

 

Thanks again for the kind words, and Jason_RJM, that was a nice little fix up there... I think I may try to duplicate that in my AE project.

As requested, here's the original footage:

The DIVX version
The Sorensen 3 version

Oh, and if you want my snow files, I guess you can have 'em. They only took me about 10 minutes in 3ds Max 5.0 total:

The falling snow Rendered with an alpha with the Quicktime Animation compresser, and zipped.
The foggy background Sorry, DIVX only.

I don't know if you can tell from the footage, but this was actually lit by the sun. I'm a poor college student, and I can't afford decent lighting yet, so I figured what better light source to use than the sun?

Oh, and as for the camera, it's just a cheap Sony Digital Hi-8 camera my partner bought a year and a half ago or so. It actually has a pretty decent picture when you shoot outdoors. It sucks in lowlighting situations though... (

For the keying, I used a simple Color Difference Key, and just added all the values of blue that I needed to key out, while keeping the fuzziness setting at 32.

Oh, and feel free to come up with your own composites, if you think you can use the raw footage I sent ya. Just post 'em here, we could have a little friendly competition. And don't just stick to a wintery theme, be creative, go nuts! Hehe. ^_^

--t.toe

 

Don't worry. I'll be sure to do my share of so socializing.

I've been a member of the Fan Films Forum since its very early days and I've been frequenting this forum on a semi daily basis for almost 2 years now.

I finally registered this morning so I could contribute and try to help out in any way I can.

Thanks for the complement!

Thanks for posting the raw footage t-toe. I'm sure will have some fun with that

 

I'm just gonna bump this up so some of you can see these new source files... ^_^

--t.toe

 

The sun... yeah, that would explain the great lighting

By the way, what do you mean by setting the fuzziness to 32? Are you talking about a gaussian blur?

Unclepain- "OK- back to the drawing room boys!"

 

When you use the Color Range chroma key in After Effects, the "fuzziness" setting is what determines how forgiving the chroma key is with the particular color of blue.

--t.toe

 

Here?s my first attempt. I wanted to find another snowy background so I could utilize the falling snow effect but unfortunately I couldn't find anything.

Instead I used a pic from my hard drive that shipped with Windows ME.

Test for T-Toe

Those from the Fan Films Forum will recognize it. I use it in allot of my bluescreen tests because I really love the pic.

One person called it "The curse of Skywalker Ranch."

 

Haha, that's awesome! Really nice keying there... I'd say that good ole Dave there needs a little more contrast and color saturation for him to REALLY blend in, but that's still amazing chroma key work.

Awesome, he must be looking for George Lucas at the ranch. Maybe he's stalking him. Hehe.

--t.toe

 

So, I'm guessing no one was interested in doing this, eh? ^_^

--t.toe