Hi all,

Just curious to see if anyone has any good ideas for a inexpensive green screen for chroma key? Just wanting to begin doing some video announcements to save some time for the service and would like to experiment.

Thanks,

Mike

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Hi Mike,
I haven't tried one yet, but I was doing some searches recently for cheap DIY green screens and came across a couple of good links. I just haven't had a chance to try either one out yet to see if they really work or not. The first link shows how to build a portable green screen and frame. The other link shows how to set up a green screen studio with lighting.

http://www.kenrickparish.com/jgeerli...eenscreen.html

http://www.davecolorado.com/index.ph...a-key-set-diy/

I hope one of these can help you. Be sure to let us know.

Steve

I have some friends who have picked a green paint from Home Depot/ Lowes that closely matched "Green Screen Green". They just painted a wall in a storage closet/ office/ backstage area. The more important aspect is your lighting, format you capture in and software you are using to pull the key.

Digital Juice has several tutorials online about setting up and pulling a decent key.

If you can plan it and set it up right you can actually use a rear screen projector setup as your background and shoot it without the green screen. You just have to keep the light off the screen.

Check out this thread How Green Was My Screen

We took some lime green plastic table cover we bought at a party store and stapled it to a wall for a project. It worked great, but because it's highly reflective, you have to be extremely careful with lighting!

Every now and again, I stop in fabric stores to look at what's on sale or of decent size in remnant bins.

The collection of cloth backdrops slowly grows in blues and greens, giving some options (darker skintones tend to key better with blue, in my expeirence - and it's an option of clothing has green in it.)

The important things are that the color is even, it's a material that can easily have the wrinkles ironed out (the ony I use the most is stored rolled and hanging from its end) and has a good, bright, well saturated color. As MediaGuy points out, a matte finish helps too, as does a weave that's tight enough that it doesn't show (felt is good too - and plus then it can double as a felt board, which means it belongs in a church!)

Painting the wall has always been my favorite "cheap" green screen. you could also dye a couple of king sized bed sheets. I was a little dissapointed when purchased a "real" one for the church only to find out that it was one big bedsheet on a suspended pole. Had I known that I could have spent a couple of bucks at the thrift shop for a couple of king-sized sheets, I could have saved a few hundred bucks.

It's kind of like the "6-on one hand" addage.

One thing that I am learning is that the better chroma key generators and the more expensive chroma key functions in the NLE are more foregiving when it comes to uneven surfaces and shadows, where as the cheaper NLE programs and generators require a nearly perfect shadow-free area to work with.

One church I visited had painted a wall in their children's area "chroma green". What was cool was that the other walls in the area were painted equally bright, "loud" colors such as pink, blue, and purple, so the green didn't even stand out, and it looked good for a kids area.

Along those lines, I am thinking that you could probably shoot the color green through a projector and place it behind the subject to shoot on the wall or a screen. It seems like that would eliminate any shadows while maintaining a consistent color.

And being that you would use a PC to generate the colored screens, you could pick any color you wanted- say someone shows up witha green shirt, then you can just chroma-key over to red or yellow.

That's basically the concept behind the Chrommatte system. A ring of LEDs around the camera lens is what colors the reflective background.