I’ve been having fun experimenting with my green screen, the only drawback I’ve noticed so far is that when chroma keying the programs have a few minor problem differentiating between the foreground and background(the green screen). I’m figuring this is because there isn’t enough light landing on the screen, so tomorrow morning I’ll give it another shot but using natural light instead.
New clips shouldn’t be far off.
Short post tonight, I made a small portable greenscreen tonight using a pin board and attaching my tablecloth screen material onto it using thumb tacks. Surface is smooth enough for my level of green screening.
Will post some photos and test footage tomorrow.
Amazingly I managed to pull it off, yay, it’s a pretty easy project and it takes less then an hour.
Cost is around $20-40 AUD depending where you source the items from (PVC connectors can be a bit expensive at hardware stores so go to a good plumbing store instead). Although oddly I couldn’t find any PVC cross connectors(the shop assistants looked at me funny when I asked for one(maybe rare in Tasmania?))
For anyone who is wanting to construct their own Fig Rig, there is a few different tutorials available on the web.
The guide I used Fig Rig another one Fig Riggery and one last Figged if i know.
And just for a random time lapse, me constructing it~ oh so exciting
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1425732659394618790[/googlevideo]
For the people who don’t know what a Fig Rig does… It spreads out the center of gravity for the Camera along the rig so the camera doesn’t absorb all the shakes directly from your hand. Hence it gives much smoother movement. James says my science is rubbish which it probably is, his explanation on how it works… “basically it makes it so that you have to apply more force to rotate the camera, hence smaller ‘jitter’ or vibration in your hands causes less movement of the camera” and read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia for further information
I’ll upload some photos of the Rig holding my camera as soon as I can get another camera to take photos with.
Todays plan:
Build a Fig Rig
A Fig Rig is a camera stabilization device for smaller cameras (e.g mine), the Fig Rig ’should’ allow me to get a much smoother shot.
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6773814407237271979[/googlevideo]
No lighting or configurations were set on the camera, I just wanted to test how it moved.
Looks pretty good when watching the source footage but google video seems to make it jerky(suspect some frames being dropped), I’ll try another recording and see how it goes.
My camera of choice is the HDR-HC7. So far it has so served me well, cept the graininess in low light(still one of the major draw backs of digital) & navigating through all the menus for simple manual changes does erk me a little but otherwise I love it.
First step in getting the camera equipment ready, The Dolly!
The Dolly was created using Equal Angle Aluminum for track, a block of wood for a base and sliding door wheels to roll on.
Big thanks to McCann & Hallz for the help. (Yeah it was created a couple of weeks back, but it’s new to my blog)
I’ll record a couple of sample videos and youtube em
