Green Screen Lighting Setup/Technique November 1, 2006
Posted by Lee Cherry in Uncategorized.Tags: animation, new media
trackback
Lighting setups for green screen and blue screen can vary depending on your equipment, stage/studio space and model/actor. Ideally you want to have the area both evenly lit from all sides and fully lit from above and below. You can easily utilize a green screen to light an actor for a short film, miniature sets/props for animations and physical models for your portfolio.
Ultimately you will need to avoid overlaying shadows which are difficult to key out as well as bright, hotspots from direct lighting which could wash out your subject matter. One particular area that is difficult to light is between the feet; with careful overhead lighting and reflective lighting from lights and umbrellas you can avoid this problem.
We had a few trials and errors with green screen lighting setups and have assembled a small Google Sketchup file that describes the technique and setup that worked the best for filming props and actors. You’ll probably need to check out multiple lamps and it is possible that you can get away with using off-the-shelf halogen shop lamps from your favorite hardware store. Although you should be aware that halogen lighting could effect color levels in some of your setups…
This Google SketchUp document allows you to manuver around the scene and is documented with explanations of the equipment used.
Advanced Media Lab, College of Design 
This is extremely useful!
Very cool way of showing it!
Renditioner
There are a few extras that IMSI have produced of late that either help out specific TurboCAD users, such as furniture makers, or greatly improve other products with IMSI technology.
One of these is the IDX Renditioner. It is a plug-in for Google SketchUp that provides high-quality photorealistic rendering – fast and easily. Renditioner works directly within SketchUp and lets you control the materials, advanced lighting components, environments, background images. Renditioner is “one button” easy with 3 render options of Preview, Standard and Presentation. It is simple enough for novices and yet powerful enough for professionals. Powerful features are optimized in a jargon free interface. Simplicity paired with speed and working directly in SketchUp, means you can achieve design visualization objectives more quickly. Renditioner offers 16 megapixel renderings for large-scale printing and powerful presentation of your designs.
It is available for Windows XP or Vista on the PC, and OS/X 10.4 or 10.5 on the Mac and runs on either PowerPC or Intel-based Mac computers. As an extra it obviously requires you to already have SketchUp, but will be fine on the free version as well as the Pro version 6.4x or later. Like all photorealistic rendering, IDX Renditioner uses a system’s RAM and CPU power extensively, and is not recommended on systems with less than 1 GB RAM, with 2 GB recommended. Being fully multithreading, dual core, quad core, or dual quad core machines will each improve system performance dramatically.
SketchUp is a nice piece of kit, but with the edition of Renditioner it jumps from good to professional, equally of use to.
[…] Green Screen Lighting Setup/Technique Advanced Media Lab, College of Design Getting ready to set up a home studio for making videos. Forums […]
Wow!
You have a cool post here. Thanks a lot for sharing this useful information.
Colors are often used to symbolize some of our abstraction and ideals. Red is used to symbolize bravery and love. The sky’s color which is blue reminds us of peace and harmony. And green makes us think of our natural surroundings. But green also stands for immaturity or being unripe as portrayed in greenwoods and green screen shots. Both of the mentioned objects are not yet seasoned to be used readily.
A green screen is a tool that is being used in green screening technique. This is a technique whereby you can create a virtual background out of a plain background. By using video production facilities and computer-based editing software, you can create a virtual sea background from a plain green screen.