For an upcoming FuncWorks project I needed to see how feasible recording with a green screen would be and merging that video with output from an Xbox 360.
This turned out to be much easier and cheaper than I imagined, which is awesome for the project!
A green screen is nothing more than a green background that later in editing software is replaced with another image or video. This has been used by everyone from your local weather man to the high end bullet time effect of The Matrix. I only needed the weather man level of capability.
The hardware: a camcorder, a green surface that’s not very reflective, and a bunch of lights. For the Xbox 360 I used a Hava Wireless HD which does good job capturing Xbox 360. Though it has a wireless option, I’m using a hard wire connection to cut down the risk of dropped frames.
Lighting the green screen is the crucial step. The green screen needs to be 1) lit evenly 2) have no shadows cast on it from the subject and 3) not reflect green light back on the subject. As you can see from the photo I was not going for perfect on these steps, I just need some workable footage for my main concern: affordable video editing software.
I’m happy to report the $80 Adobe Premiere Elements 8 (PE8) has everything needed to edit and encode video for even the advanced home studio. There are two options in Elements for working with a green screen: Green Screen Effect and Chroma Key Effect. The Green Screen Effect is really a simple version of the Chroma Key Effect and the one I went with to start. It required no tweaking on my part, it just found and removed the green screen from the video. Chroma Key has many more options and can be used with any color, and as I learn more of the tool I’ll probably switch to using it to get a better end result (my test project left me with a slight green halo – an artifact common when you are too close to the green screen).
The last part of the test was the upload. I’ve tried Vimeo in the past, and I’m impressed with their quality over YouTube, plus YouTube limits HD videos to 10 minutes. A quick search on Vimeo site and I found a list of recommended encoder settings for getting the best quality, and a user’s blog post on Vimeo and Elements.
The final result I uploaded to Vimeo and Youtube to compare. We’ll probably upload to both, as YouTube has traffic and a social aspect Vimeo lacks, and use Vimeo for embedding high quality version on the project’s site. I’ve embedded Vimeo’s result below, but since I’m still using a free account I can’t embed the HD version – You’ll need to click through to the site to see it.
Green Screen / Xbox Test
Posted By Mike On Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Filed under video xbox funcworks |
Comments (1)
G. Andrew Duthie
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Tuesday, January 05, 2010
10:11:19 PM
That's pretty slick, Michael! Thanks for sharing.
