Creating a believable and original interview set up when shooting in front of a green screen can be a challenge, especially if you don’t have access to a quality library of industry standard chroma key video background plates. Unfortunately, using a random blurred out still image just isn’t a good enough when you’re trying to deliver a professional result, no matter how well you lit your scene and match the various settings.
There are many other situations when utilizing a green screen does make a lot more sense for your compositions. At the end of the day, it can be a quite efficient and effective solution that saves money and time, however, finding believable chroma key video background plates often can be a difficult and overwhelming task.
This is where the multi-angled and DoF plates of the recently established company ProPlates may come in handy.
The platform provides high-quality royalty-free background plates, ranging in prices from $40 to $70. The plates come in multiple angles with detailed production specs providing the necessity information for seamless chroma key workflow such as Duration, Resolution, Frame Rate, Focal Length, Shot Composition, Lens Height, Focal Distance, Apertures, etc.
The production elements have been shot in HD, and 4K resolution all acquired with Super 35 sensor cameras and in 4:2:2 colour subsampling. Matching the shot details to your source footage by having the same focal length, focus distance, aperture and shot composition is the best method for achieving convincing professional results as shown in the following tutorial.
Complete Greenscreen with Eve Hazelton from Realm Pictures on Vimeo.
ProPlate Chroma Key Background Plates are available in 4 varieties – Quickplates, Prostandard, Studioline and Prodeluxe. For the higher ProDeluxe plan, you can select ProRes or DNxHD codecs, focal length, and even shot framing.
All the plans, except the Quickplates, provide the ability to choose from multiple aperture settings and focal lengths. As long as you’re using a camera system with a Super 35 sized sensor, whether it’s an actual 35mm film, RED Dragon, Canon C300, Canon 7D, Sony FS7, Samsung NX1 or ARRI Alexa all of your shots should match up very nicely with the provided background plates.
When shooting source footage on cameras that have sensors that are smaller or larger than the S35 sensor, you simply need to match the field of view of the lens you’re shooting by changing the distance from your subject to the camera. This way you will get the desired framing and select a background with the amount of de-focus that you want.
Currently, the provided plates styled as tech, home, office and outside environments can be purchased at a 25% discount through May 1st by using the code “SPRING25“.
[via Studio Daily]
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This is great! We just shot a series of interviews on green, expecting to shoot background plates next week. Then my client cut the budget for that and asked if we could just ‘photoshop in’ some pictures in the background. At least now I don’t have to search Flickr for backgrounds that are gonna end up sucking.
Fortunately, you don’t have to search Flickr. I think this is definitely the better option for your project. I’m glad that this article helps. Cheers!