Check out these foam-backed greenscreens.

They have different sizes, you didn't say what size you need.

The foam is very helpful for avoiding wrinkles.

Cheap muslin can be shiny which easily gives a nasty back spill.

I have one of the foam-backed greenscreens that Coursedesign pointed to and they are outstanding! Very bright and easy to light yet not a lot of spill. I’m going to get a bigger one soon (I only got a 5x5 foot to test for $25). As for lighting, be sure to read Keith Kolbo’s Chromakey Techniques for Budget Productions on the VASST web site. It will help get you started with inexpensive lighting. You could also use two softboxes as well if you have them. The secret is to have even lighting across the whole screen and keep your talent well in front of the screen and light them separately.

If you are doing the keying in Vegas, also be sure to read Kieth’s Gain a better understanding of Chromakey / Greenscreen / Bluescreen for some great tips on getting the most out of the Vegas chroma keyer.

~jr

Can anyone steer me in the right direction to get started using a green screen. Newer to all this and any advice is apprecited, even if it is simple.

Thanks in advance.

How about checking out the links that Johnny Roy provided? I'm sure these will give you a good starting point.

richard Hunter

We used a 8'x8' foot foam backed greenscreen, not sure of the brand, and it worked ok. It did have fold wrinkles so we had to stretch it out as much as possible on a metal rack.

You really have to light the hell out of it, we used two soft boxes, but four would have been better. It's all about bright and even distribution.

Because you have to have talent so far in front of it to light it properly I had a problem framing two people in a shot. The metal frame krept in on the sides, so I had to mask it out manually, but Vegas makes that easy with the Pan/Crop "masking" tools.

Can you talk a little more about positioning your softboxes? If you have two, I assume you set one on each side. Do you set them high shooting down, low shooting up, or medium shooting straight across? if you went to 4 boxes, how would you set them?

I assume good lighting and good smooth solid color material makes life much easier in creating your masks. But no matter the lighting or the material, etc for the greenscreen, if you succeed at getting the mask right, it was a good set up, right? Am I missing something else?

I've been using softboxes, but don't particularly care for the space they take up or the heat.

Just bought a couple of 6ft. four-tube fixtures at Home Depot, with good reflectors and electronic ballasts, plus some high-CRI tubes. If these work as well as I think, there will be enough light and no heat.

Fluros are great for lighting screens.
Of course the biggest help apart from all the other tips is shooting 4:2:2 or HDV.
Bob.

I do greenscreen stuff for my church fairly often, so I actually painted a wall of one of my bedrooms green. I got the paint at Lowe's - went around looking for the brightest, greenest paint I could find. I got some that was in their Nickeloden collection.

For lighting, I have three double-bulb fluorescent fixtures (bought at Lowe's) that I stuck some daylight color tubes in. I have two lighting tree stands that are about 4 feet from the wall. Each of those has one of the fixtures mounted vertically on it. Then, I have a pipe stretched across both of them at the top, about 9 feet up, that I hung the third fixture on. This arrangement provides a nice, even lighting on the wall.

The talent stands just in front of the light stands - so the lights don't actually hit them. To light the talent, I have a softbox on a stand.

You can see some of the videos on our church website, here:

http://www.faceofgrace.org/content/category/7/37/77/

Look at the videos: "Lions, Den & Deleuth" and "Evil". The portions of "Evil" where the devil is sitting on people's shoulders is all green-screen. If you want to see what the green screen setup looks like, look at "Evil - The Outtakes".

Besides getting a nice even background lighting, the biggest thing that has helped me get good chromakey is to apply a slight chromablur BEFORE the chromakey fx. That got rid of any jaggies around the edges. The only bad thing is that adding chromablur really makes the render time go up.

Thanks for the links and tips everyone, it's been helpful.

I'm actually working on a green-screen tutorial to put online, might be able to help some others and get some tips for myself too.

I haven't tried this myself, but I think that low-CRI fluorescent lighting would likely be better for lighting the greenscreen.

You really only want GREEN light coming from the greenscreen, and not that much red or blue light. Generally, low-CRI fluorescents output a lot more green than high-CRI ones.

So with low-CRI fluorescents, you could have the same amount of green light coming from the screen, but with less red and blue light. You might have a very small advantage in doing that... or not.
But the lower CRI fluorescents will also help you with cost, or light output (more light ouput for the same electricity and per fixture). You can tradeoff light output for other things, like the softness of the light (which makes the screen more even... and less shadows on wrinkles).

Plant lights might be a good low-CRI light... they have abysmal CRI ratings (like 25 or so) and are designed for high light output + energy efficiency.

2- If you want your lights to be used for other things, then getting high-CRI fluorescents may be a better idea.

Sorry, I was rushing when I wrote this. I bought both low-CRI warm-white tubes for greenscreen use and high-CRI daylight tubes for subject fill-in use with natural window light (I love natural light).

For a really inexpensive solution, try going to a party store and buying a roll of green plastic table cloth. They come in 25, 50, and 100 foot lengths and are under 15 bucks. You can get them in blue or green. You will have to figure out how to hang them. I simply stapled them to a wall. I've heard of folks building wooden bracing and stretching the plastic.