http://video-alchemy.com In this quick tutorial we see how you can get better DIY green screen or Chroma key lighting on the cheap with standard strip lights and get better results than more expensive fluorescent studio lights. {Partial Video Transcript} Do you struggle with green screen lighting like this guy because if you i have something you need to know, stay tuned to find out. One of the biggest problems with doing green screen or chromakey work is to make sure that the light behind you is even on the green screen because even with the best green screen material, if you dont have an even light, it ain't going to work well. But there is a way you can do it, it can cost as little as a few dollars, it produces a good even light and it works better than a lot of standard studio lighting like this and best of all it also works really well on white backgrounds. Now even with a really good green screen and this is a muslin material which stretched out and it has all creases pulled out of its a really nice and smooth you need good lighting and even lighting to give you a good key. Now I'm using these lights here at the moment, these are standard studio lights and as you can see the fluorescent tubes mounted in the studio by boxes. Now that looks like it's producing a really good key but actually we need to see how this looks on the chromakey software or something which can see what the chromakey software will see, to see what it really looks like. Now in order to see what your chromakey software is going to see, you need something which is far more sensitive than your eyes and here we have an app for the iPad and the iPhone and is called Greenscreener and is by of a company called Hollywood camera work. Now what this does is it looks at the green screen using the camera of the actual mobile device and it will then show what it sees as the levels of light and colours these and ideally what you want is the whole thing to look completely green and what we got here is we got to hotspots of green and that's caused by the two lights and you can see that is an uneven lighting pattern and this is going to cause a problem in your chromakey software because to try and even this out in your chromakey, you can crank up the tolerance a lot more and that means going to loose edge detail, you lose detail on hair and on semitransparent materials. You may end up doing them more and more masking and multiple keying. So to try and get this lighting right in the first place is really very important this got me thinking that studio lights do actually do a good job but they just not tall enough and not long enough, you can see here this is the length or the actual height of the actual green screen, it needs to be much deeper and it needs be a better more even coverage . So it got me thinking what can you use that has a good even lighting output that is not going to be another set of expensive lights and I think I found the answer. So this is what I have come up with, it is basically a ceiling light which is mounted on a studio standard lighting stands. Now as you can see this is actually a 5 foot length tube so it's much longer and buts got a much more even throw of light from top to bottom. These things are available really cheaply sometimes they even throw them out in to skips when they're refurbishing factories and buildings and shops so they are easy get hold of. If you can't find one second hand you can buy them new really cheaply but there are couple of things or recommend you get rather than just the cheapest possible thing from the hardware store. Now one of the things I would recommend is actually get these type of tubes, these are daylight balanced tubes they produce the 5300 Kelvin light output and these are made by Philips and called Master Graphica and these are the 950 in 58 watt. Now the thing about these is they will produce a balanced light which matches then the rest of the studio if you are using daylight balanced lighting equipment they don't have to worry about inconsistent lights. Normal fluorescent tubes, normally run around about 4400 Kelvin or lower, so that means you'll get a mix of lighting and you don't want that when you actually try to keep a consistent balanced lighting setup in your studio. Now when it comes to the actual light fitting there are two types, there's the normal ballast types which run on the mains and run at the mains frequency and then there are the electronic ones. This one is actually an electronic one they look exactly the same for the outside the only difference is that ballast unit inside is either electronic or it's just a normal coil based one.

• published: 27 Feb 2014
• views: 9