Digital Commons at Penn State

The Digital Commons offer’s an array of great technology; one of the things available at the Digital Commons is Green Screen technology. Green Screen Technology is a process used at almost all levels of Video and Film production, it is a technique in which a subject is shot with an even colored background, usually chroma blue or green, and in post production that background can be taken out and replaced with one of your choice. In this tech update I wanted to talk about a product that simplifies the process of using green screen technique is a video or film production.

If you’ve used a green screen before then you already know how powerful the technology can be, but you also know how difficult it can sometimes be to control. When using a green screen the screen itself must be lit almost perfectly even with no shadows or spots that are dark or brighter than the rest. If this happens then it becomes difficult and sometimes impossible to key those spots out. Another big problem that we run into when shooting green screen is that the light can reflect off of the screen and hit our subject. This spill will also make it difficult to key out the screen in postproduction. You may of even seen this spill on television, for instance I saw an episode of Frank TV the other day and I could see a green outline all the way around Frank in some of the shots they used. Immediately I knew they had trouble with lighting their green screen. I want to talk about a product that has and will continue to change how many of us use green screen technology. That product is called Chromatte, created by Reflecmedia; Chromatte is a somewhat new and exciting way for us to get perfect Green Screen key’s with few drawbacks.

Here’s how it works Chromatte is a new kind of fabric that has built in millions of tiny little reflective beads. These beads are engineered to reflect light directly back to its source. This means that the fabric is simply gray to our eyes in regular light. Reflecmedia has combined this fabric with something they call a light ring. The light ring is simply a ring of several Light Emitting Diodes that go around the lens of the camera, what this does is causes the fabric to shine a very even shade green, or blue depending on which ring you use, directly at the camera. Having the light directed only at the camera suppresses that Spill problem we talked about earlier. This also alleviates the need for us to Light the screen independently, in other words we get a perfectly lit screen with no lights and no spill. Now our subject no longer has to sit far away from the screen, we no longer have to spend sometimes hours lighting the screen, the postproduction key is perfect, and we have the availability to easily use high contrast lighting with our green screen footage.

Now I have never personally used this product although I am anxious to do so, but Reflecmedia has been around for a few years and is getting heavy use in Great Britain as well as the United States, specifically the BBC uses this technology in their broadcast shows. If you go to www.reflecmedia.com and click on the Multimedia link at the top you can see some demo video of the product including the BBC among others. I am also excited to see that some of their products are starting to come down to a price range affordable to those of us not used to Hollywood style budgets, truly exciting times.