I have a Botaro two sided foldable screen (actually an art to get it back in it's bag)
it is OK for closeups. The key is even lighting as smhontz said but is fun to do.

The screen itself is a pretty trivial concern. As noted how you light it matters more. What you shoot it with and what you use to extract the matte is what matters most.

Bob.

Ah, I am having troubles here. I got some green fabric to do my first green screen. I pulled the fabric as tight as I could and pinned them to my garage wall. I put 4 lights pointing at the fabric from the sides. I put the talent about 4 feet away, put a light behind him to back light and also a spot on his face. I put a chroma key on the video track, with a chroma blur first bout halfway settings, and I am really having trouble getting good results.
When I first apply the chroma key, I click on the dropper in the FX panel and drag across a square of the green that is the fabric in the background. Immediately, everything just kind of seems see through until I adjust the thresholds a little bit and mostly it comes in decent. There are spots, though, where I don't get pixels that go away, and if I try and use the thresholds, I just lose parts of the face. Also, there is always a green outline around him after I do the keying.
I am sure this is obvious to you all, could you please help me? Here is a screenshot that I took of one of my shots:


http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i17/goodtimej/snap.jpg

please help!

That background is not exactly evenly lit, there's two hot spots on either side at the edge of the screen.

However don't try to do all the screen. The only bit that matters is the area immediately around the talent. First get that as good as you can ignoring the rest. Then use anyone of a number of things such as the Cookie Cutter, masks etc to cutout the rest of the screen.


Bob.

If you want to drop me an email, I'll email you back a .veg.
My email address is in my profile.

Bob.

Here are two links that will help you.
Lighting

Keying

The big thing I see in your picture is that the lingting is not even and that you are too close to the background. I use green fleece from the fabric store and I have great success.

KK

I've been working on my first chroma key composite recently, and was very surprised with the quality of the greenscreen video supplied. (being an amateur, I thought that if a cable studio did the shoot, the results would be very high quality...) As you can see it's quite unevenly lit and has pretty nasty dark areas around the wrinkles.

greenscreen image

With the help of this excellent garbage key tutorial from Spot and Vegas' color correction tools, I was able to easily obtain a decent result. (You pros out there, go easy on me, ok? This is just a working version...) You may find it helpful in eliminating a lot of the unevenly lit areas in your screen.

keyed result

Here's a tip (and I'm no pro), your talent is nicely lit and so is the background. Except the lighting on the talent doesn't seem to match the lighting of the background. Good CK is more than just extracting the matte, that's really just a technical issue. Making the thing hang together so that he looks like it's not a CK, that's what takes a bit of skill.

Bob.

Bob, are you referring to my example or to that of the original poster? Oh, wait, I guess the original post contained only a greenscreen image, didn't it?

Anway, if your comment is addressed at me, do you have a generic hint at what to do to correct it? The background scene is a small, zoomed-in portion of a very large photograph.

Thanks,
Chuck

Well the back ground is low key lighting, i.e. very flat evenly lit, no shadows.
The guy in the front is lit high key, heavy shadows. You can't do anything about the background so you'd have to match his lighting to it.
Can't really tell from the screenshot but if that background is a zoomed in photo you might also have a problem with the background looking too soft compared to the talent.

Bob.

Thanks a lot you all. I'll have to put myself through a crash course once I get home. I so hate being a noob.

I've tried to mess with levels and color curves to lighten up on the shadows, but haven't had much luck. Is that the approach you'd take or is there something else that you'd suggest, Bob?

Hey, goodtimej, hang in there. Remember we're all noobs sometime and everybody here knows something nobody else does, even if it's just your name or SS number. Won't be long before you're helping somebody, yourself. Have fun!

What Sony should have done is buy the Serious Magic company and their keyer, Ultra.

Adobe has since bought the company and its assets and thus Ultra is now off the market (unless you can find an old--and now unsupported--version on a shelf somewhere) and is an embedded part of Premiere.

Is the keyer in Vegas sub-par compared to other products? Should I be able to get a decent key off of the footage that I posted?
If so, where should I look elsewhere?

First you have to try with a real green screen :-)

Your screen looks like a sprite commercial, lymon? or whatever they call it. It's yellow and green and way too bright.

By well lit screen it doesn't mean, brightly lit. It has to be evenly lit, and actually shouldn't be very bright at all.

The key ( I guess... pun intended ) is getting a consistent green color across the entire screen, or at least areas around your talent.

All this should give me a lot to do. Thanks for the words, all.