http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – For those of us who grew up in the age of CGI, green screen is just “a thing that computers do”. But how did effects like this work before the age of pixels? With the help of some suitably shiny graphics, here’s a quick summary.
Thank you to Matt Gray – http://mattg.co.uk – http://twitter.com/unnamedculprit – for sterling work getting the camera and lighting right!
25 Comments
Sorry this video’s a couple of days late! I’ve been working on BIG EXCITING
THINGS. (Or at least, I’ve been working on THINGS.)
Very interesting, would be cool to know whey they switched from blue screen
to green screen.
One afternoon? You are getting good man!
Sodium light monochromatic? And there was me thinking sodium was famous for
its twin spectral lines.
Ahh computers, those magical objects that make jobs obsolete 😛 No wonder
so many people can’t find work nowadays. I honestly pity the youngest
generation, many of them will live in poverty. The sad truth is that there
will always be people too stupid to do an intellectual “futuristic”job. A
100 years ago they could find a menial job, and live a decent, honest life.
In 20 or 30 years those jobs will be done by machines operated by
computers. The poor folks who would gladly do those jobs will be left to
rot on the streets, or we will have to support more and more people on
welfare. How long until a revolution?
But why did we change from blue to green screen?
About 2 minutes in he mentions “the BBC used a bit of kit called the
Quantel Paintbox for Doctor Who as early as 1980”
Perhaps different kit, but they were greenscreening (CSO) the heck out of
Doctor Who about a decade before that. See “Terror of the Autons”… also
“Inferno” I think…
The history of green screens was good, but come on, you horrendously
oversimplified how its done today. Yes, it can be done by just chucking in
a key light node/effect, but that will never be good enough for film level
stuff.
Keylight automates a lot of stuff that is usually manually setup and
meticulously tweaked by experienced artists to get the best matte possible.
Some processes include despilling the green, preparing the shot before you
even key with degraining, screen correcting to even out the green on the
screen, and then you can do the key, which involves a core, edge, and fine
detail matte, each optimised so you don’t lose any edge detail or have any
holes in the matte. There are also many different types of keyers;
lumanince, hue, saturation, whatever.
Manual roto or paint work may be required to remove unwanted things like
wires, lights, boom mic or whatever. When compositing the foreground with
the background, even the background may be treated with an additive key to
bring back lost hair detail.
And then you can start to actually integrate the fg with the BG with the
usual compositing tricks, bloom and lightwrap, grades and colour
corrections, regrain etc.
No such thing as perfect key first try ;)
That’s why old movies and music so good because they had to be good actors
and musicians so they wouldnt waste film and reel to reels and it was
expensive now hollywood cranks shitty movies and music out left and right
because all you need is a computer
Greenscreening with Blender’s video editor is a pain in the ass. They
should have a real green screen effect strip that’d work similarly to the
effect seen in the beginning of this video.
Oh no I found the Eurofags, better leave before the hate comes.
You just called yourself a jerk. Hehehe
You’re right, it is strongly simplified, but informative for inexperienced
people nonetheless. Very good, then!
This is great. On a similar note you should read about how they restored
the classic Dr Who series ‘Daemons’. They had an official 16mm monochrome
film print, and a fan in the US had recorded a colour version on U-Matic
video tape which was much lower resolution. The restoration team rigged up
a system where the luminance signal from the film was combined with chroma
signal from the tape and produced the version we can now watch on DVD.
I’m jealous because you got to film this at the YouTube studio. Gonna be a
while before we get one of those in South Africa…
I’m not a jerk but I do process chromakey all the time, using a computer
and After Effects and a special recipe to get the foreground subject off of
the green background.
Showing my age here but before you were born, green was Chromakey Blue.
nah, one person with a laptop can do this for free. After effects could be
considered the (financial) high-end.
Someone’s a RHPS fan.
از زمانی که دستی در ادیت ویدیو پیدا کردم و توانایی Chroma Key رو فرا گرفتم،
برام این پرسش بوجود آمده بود که پیش از فراگیر شدن کامپیوتر و در دوران
فیلمهای آنالوگ این روش ادیت چطور انجام میشده؟ ویدیو پاسخ این پرسش رو میده.
* کروما کی روشیست که هنرپیشه در جلوی یک پردهء سبز رنگ نقش بازی میکنه و
هنگام ادیت، هر جا که رنگ سبز وجود داره با تصویر دیگری جایگزین میشه.
#سینما #هنر
Woah, I learned something today.
It was greatly presented as well
Couldn’t have green screened your little mic out of the shot there?
I’m more interested in how they do it WITH computers?
One of the big problems with less expensive analog video keying gear was
that it tended to be a bit slow. The result was that it switched from
background to subject a little bit to the right of where it should have,
and the same at the other side of the subject. This added a little visible
edge on the right side of people, especially visible on meteorologists on
the local tv news.
Early video artists (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik)
intentionally amplified this “problem” by looping it through the effect
repeatedly, to distort images for artistic ideas. For example, a round ball
would appear to become squashed. It wasn’t very fancy, but it was fun.
Very encouraging. Many times I felt disappointed because of my results with
chroma or whatever, but after watching this video… hey, my father didn’t
had this at my age! :D