Really Important Car/Green Screen Scene
Okay, I'm in my teenage years (so that means low-budget), and I'm making a movie (well, series of short movies, shall I say "series?"). There is a car scene, and I have a green screen. iMovie isn't doing anything for me right now, it won't even let me edit the size of the videos anymore. So, I'm considering buying Final Cut Express HD. Will that let me use the Chroma Keyer Effect (green screen effefct)? Before I made the switch to Mac, I was using Sony Vegas on Windows. That was a 50-100 dollar program that had the green screen effect. I never really used it though. Now, that I'm making my series, I decided to get an iMac. I need to know if Final Cut will let me do everything I need for this car scene. Also, what will I need to know to shoot it. I know I'm going to have to shoot the road passing by, but I don't know if it'll fit the background of the car scene. I'm afraid one will end up being too up close, making everything look bigger. Please help me, I'm just a beginner, and I really want to make it big one day.
~Anthony
Mac OS X (10.4.6)
Hi Anthony,
Yes, Final Cut Express has effects for chroma key and green & blue screen. They do essentially the same job except the chroma key effect gives you more detailed controls; it's also more challenging to use. They all work really well, although you will find different people prefer one or the other depending on their experience and what they are trying to do with it.
As Ian mentioned, if you have one of the new Intel iMacs you should wait until the universal version of FCE is released.
As far as what else you need, you will need a green or blue background which could be either fabric or paint. Whether you choose blue or green depends on which color is less likely to be in the other elements of the shot that you are keying, although most people nowdays seem to be using green. I got a Botero fabric green screen from B&H Photo in NYC that was not expensive and it works great. They have many different screen colors & sizes as well as paint.
I recommend that you get a copy of Tom Wolsky's book Final Cut Express Editing Workshop. It's worth every penny.
There are also a number of very good articles on chroma keying on Ken Stone's Final Cut website
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IS HD REALLY HD- GREENSCREEN ISSUES
These plates were all shot with an HVX-200, mostly with the 100 MBps DVCPROHD codec. This was good enough for us for Visual Effects For Directors because we had specific needs, but we don't consider them good enough for full film production.
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PIXEL ASPECT: When a camera is listed as 1920x1080 HD, that's really stretching the truth. You'll see that all our plates are in 1280x1080, which is the original camera resolution, meaning that the plate has to be stretched 150% on the X-axis to be in the right aspect. In other words, you're only operating at 66% resolution on the X-axis. Did someone say "smearing"?
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