Read more articles about lighting and video/film production at my Indie Film Blog.

This is not the right way to shoot a green screen, but I needed to work in a hurry.

I found an opportunity to convince some business folks on the benefits of an in-house studio space with a built-in pre-lit green screen. I wanted to make sure the execs knew that we already had the technical capacity to shoot and composite green screen work and that we only needed dedicated space to make an efficient system.

The first photo shows my basic screen setup inside the office used for my editing/equipment storage room. The main screen is a Photoflex Flexdrop collapsible blue/green screen. Since I needed to grab a full body shot, I clipped on the vinyl green screen that shipped with my copy of Serious Magic Visual Communicator Studio.

The first big problem with this whole setup is that there is not enough room to evenly light the screen and talent. All of the lights would have to be placed too close.

The second problem (which you can’t see) is that I had to place the camera in the hallway to properly frame the wide shots. While I set everything up, people kept asking permission to pass (and later wandered in front of the camera whenever I tried to shoot. )

The set-up was not ideal, but it was my best solution for this quick test shoot. I planned to use Serious Magic Ultra 2 to do the compositing, so I figured this would test the software’s capacity for pulling keys from sub-par setups.

The second image shows the lighting setup. I used a Lowel Rifa Light for my foreground key light and a silver reflector to bounce fill light from the opposite side.

The screen is lit by a Lowel Tota light shining through some tough spun diffusion material. Spill from this light was controlled by clipping some blackwrap to the light to flag it off from the rest of the room.

Hidden from view is a Litepanel LED light that I hung overhead to create a backlight. This is a great little light that you can stick just about anywhere. It dims without color shift and works on battery. I hang it from a boom arm when I want to drop a little light in without having to run cables. As a bonus, it also runs cool.

I recorded the footage with a Sony Z1U HDV camcorder in 1080i mode. The footage was transferred to my Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 edit suite and saved to disk. The HDV footage was loaded into Ultra 2 for compositing.

Ultra 2 is a pretty cool little software package. It comes with virtual sets and background stills that you can drop behind your subjects.

Ultra 2 uses technology called vector keying to extract the subject from the background. You shoot a bit of footage of the screen without the talent, and then use that to let the program define the key. The program is looking for differences between the background and the image with the subject. It is sort of like screen correction in the Ultimatte process. This is supposed to compensate for unevenly lit screens and allow the software to still create a great key. The big limitation is you cannot move the camera. Ultra compensates for this by creating virtual camera movements to liven things up.

I found the key definition process in Ultra to be counter intuitive. I have some experience pulling keys in After Effects and missed the ability to view the matte and fine tune my settings. One of my full body shots just wasn’t working in Ultra. I used the Keylight plugin in After Effects to quickly create a key and then comped it over a pure green background. I output the results as an uncompressed file and reloaded it into Ultra to insert in a virtual set.

I was surprised that this clip, with the smoothest and most even green background, was hardest to key in Ultra. I don’t know why it was so much trouble. I had to use a lot of matte choking to get it to work. Ultra shrunk the clip down to fit in the virtual set, so you do not notice much.

For head and shoulder shots, this type of setup works fine. For full body you really need more room to seperate the talent from the screen and to get the lights further away too. You can see my results below. It is not bad - not perfect either.

Ultra isn’t quite the instant virtual set dream I had hoped for. It does a fine job, but I think I’ll be more happy pulling most of my comps together in After Effects. The virtual sets look very computer generated. There is also no way to bring in your own 3D scenes.

Do you have questions about green screens and virtual sets that I didn’t answer? Drop me a note with your question and I’ll get you an answer.

The Go-To Guy

Play Flash version

In an earlier post called Record Your Voice for Fun And Profit, I had mentioned my recent purchase of an Olympus VN-960PC Digital Voice Recorder. My goal was to replace my dead micro-cassette recorder and possibly find an inexpensive solution for recording audio content that I could post on the web and maybe even sell as part of an educational audio series or audio book.

I knew from the product descriptions and reviews that this recorder compresses the audio pretty heavily and stores it in a proprietary format. My hope was, given the narrow dynamic range of spoken voice recordings, with a little tweaking in post production I could get an acceptable quality recording. I figured a close mike would also help by creating a strong input signal.

Digital Recorder Testing Procedure

My test was very simple. I recorded a short clip of myself talking into a low-cost headset (a likely recording scenario) and also into the built-in mike. The recorded was set to its highest quality settings. I also recorded a short clip on my laptop at high quality 48khz 32bit using the headset mike.

I created a processed version of the first two recordings in an effort to improve the overall quality of the sound. (I’m not a sound engineer, so I’m sure it is possible to do a better job with this. Mostly I normalized the levels and adjusted the EQ to boost the low and midtones a bit and roll off the highs where noise seemed most distracting.)

Finally I converted everything to 44khz 128Kbps mono MP3 files for posting on the web.

Listen to the sample audio recordings from the Olympus VN-960PC Digital Voice Recorder

Conclusions

The Olympus VN-960PC Digital Voice Recorder is a very compact and easy to use device. The controls are simple to operate and intuitive. I could start and stop recording, and playback recordings without having to look at the device. This is great for taking notes while driving and during other multi-tasking situations.

The recorder has long available record times (5 hours in HQ mode) and other nice features like voice activated recording that stops during the dead space in a recording without the user having to ride the pause button.

Functionally speaking, I was impressed with the recorder. But my hopes were deflated when it came to the quality of the finished recordings. As the samples make clear, they don’t cut it. They are acceptable for creating free podcasts, etc., but I’d be disappointed if I paid for a recording that sounded like that. It would undermine my impression of the value of the content. I was surprised to find that the built-in mike sounded so much better than the headset.

I think this device will be great for note taking and for snagging unexpected interviews, but my search for a high quality compact recorder goes on (Why doesn’t my Palm Tungsten T5 not have a mike jack and recording software… the previous version did?) In the meantime I’ll be transcoding audio bits through the USB connection on the Vn-960PC. That brings me to a pet peeve.

Everybody and their uncle uses MP3’s for high quality compressed audio. It does a good job of holding the important bits of sound while keeping file sizes low and every audio editing package and player can read and write MP3’s. It drives me a little nuts whenever companies (Sony, are you listening?) insist on proprietary compression formats. Olympus does this for their whole voice recorder line. This means everything must be transcoded as you transfer it to the PC before it’s useful anywhere else. And that brings me to another irritation.

Why must I be forced to install another audio program to connect with the recorder? It should show-up as an external storage device with files and folders. I should be able to plug in to the USB cable and open up a file for playback. Instead, I run more software to handle this one task. Maybe it’s incredibly useful and intuitive for fortune 500 executives and their personal assistants? Not for me!
In spite of these drawbacks, the Olympus VN-960PC Digital Voice Recorder is a nice piece of equipment that works as advertised - I was just hoping for a little more.

If you are taking notes or recording a meeting or lecture, the audio quality is much better than a tape based micro-cassette recorder. The recordings are intelligable and the built in mike does a remarkable job. But, if you have an Ipod or Pocket PC that you carry around anyway, get a microphone adapter and record to that. That way, if you ever need it, you’ll have a clean recording to sell.

The Go-To Guy

On my indie filmmaking blog I posted an article reviewing my new Porter Case camera case.

If you travel frequently with equipment and lots of bags, check out the review of this camera case that comes with a built in hand-truck.

Recently I took a car trip from New York City (my home) to Michigan (my birthplace.) For those who’ve never made the trip, it takes 10 hours if you don’t hit traffic or stop too much - and I was travelling by myself. I use to pack books-on-tape and plenty of CDs to fill the time. Last year I got a Palm Tungsten T5 that can play back MP3s in addition to all the regular PDA functions. The trick now is to pick a good selection of stuff to listen to and load it onto the T5.

I’ve got a few favorite CDs ripped to the T5 already (Pink Floyd’s PULSE, William Shatner’s Has Been, Kid Rock’s Cocky, and Tool’s Undertow) but I wanted to listen to some podcasts - I wanted to listen to people talking about stuff without surfing AM radio. So I started looking around Odeo.com looking for something to download.

My website work has been high on my mind for a while now, so I started looking for some marketing and promotion podcasts. I looked up Yaro Starak, and downloaded some of his podcasts. He’s got a very interesting blog called Entrepreneur’s Journey that I’ve been following for a while now. I also came across a podcast from a website called Savvy Solo Cast that was an interview with James Maduk about creating info products. James advocates recording everything you do and generating media assets that you can publish and sell. This got me thinking about recording some of my own thoughts.

Inspiration Strikes

My plan is to make audio recording a habit. When someone asks a question concerning a subject I have a special knowledge about (like why junk mail with a hand written address is more likely to get opened than junk mail with a printed label) I’ll pop out the recorder as I give my response and then type up the results for a blog posting or other such use. Or, when I meet someone interesting and have a conversation that I think others might enjoy, I’ll pop out the recorder and ask for permission to record the discussion. It’ll be like having a giant net that I can drag through my world and catch ideas and insights. Then I can look for ways to package and distribute them to others.

My Voice Recorder Problem

I got excited thinking of all of the ways I could utilize this approach and was inspired to dictate a couple of articles for this website, but the old microcassette recorder I had brought along with me died. I hooked my laptop to a headset and fired up the free Audacity audio recording software I installed then captured my notes. This was a very cumbersome setup not well suited for making a simple voice recording (and not safe to manage while driving.) If I expected to be able to make voice recordings at a moment’s notice I was going to need an easier solution.

Finding the Right Recorder

I decided to start looking for a digital voice recorder that would accept a microphone input and - here’s the kicker - not cost me a small fortune. I also didn’t want to have to carry around adapters and add-on gear that is often required to make an MP3 player record from a mike.

My T5’s single worst design flaw is that Palm removed the voice recording feature that was part of earlier models. But, even if it did record voices, having to navigate through screen options to make a recording isn’t a good solution when you are driving down the road. I wanted something small, sleek, high quality, and easy to use and navigate with one hand. So, the hunt was on.

A stop at the local CompUSA gave me a chance to look at several different options up close. As I guessed, most of the MP3 players that recorded audio used a built-in mike and didn’t have a place to plug an exteral mike in. They also had the negative of interfaces designed for playback and not recording. The better suited models were way more pricey than I was prepared to spend. The DVR (Digital Voice Recorder) style units seemed most appropriate.

I found the Olympus VN-960PC model and was ready to part with cash. It’s small, nicely laid out, has a mike and headphone jack on top, and claims to have enough storage space for hours of HQ recordings. My only concern was the recording format and quality settings it used. The store staff gave me blank stares when I asked, and the 5 bullet points on the sales sign didn’t address the issue. I wrote down the model number in my T5, went back to work, and looked it up online.

My Audio Recording Solution

After reading reviews and searching out every different make and model of DVR, I came back to this one. It records almost 6 hours of audio in a 16 kHz sample rate WAV file. Nearly every review said that the sound quality was excellent, so I hope that the recordings will sound good enough to sell. When the recorder arrives I’ll post a review about my experiences with it.

Happy Audio Recording,

The Go-To Guy

I had to make a very difficult choice recently. Unexpectedly, I received approvals to purchase a new High Definition video camera and had to hastily put together a purchase order for a new camera package. We’re talking about a budget in the low 5 figures, so I had the money to buy whatever I wanted and I was the person deciding what was needed. But, the choice was hard to make.

My HD Camera Dilemma

For the past year I’ve been doing a lot of research about the emerging HDV and low end HD video camera market. I’ve read and re-read all of the whitepapers and sales copy. I’ve attended the DV Expo, the post NAB gathering at Able Cinetech, and various seminars by Sony and Adobe to get more info and put my hands on the technology. I’ve asked questions, read magazines, studied workflows and more to prepare myself to advocate for upgrades at my corporate job. And I fell in lust with the Panasonic AG-HVX200.

When I saw my first demo of the AG-HVX200 (read DigitalContentProducer.com’s review) at DV Expo East this year, I fell in love with the idea of recording directly to digital files on the P2 cards (no more digitizing), having no moving parts on the camera, and being able to record full DVCPro HD footage, at multiple frame rates, on a sub-$10,000 camera. The achilles heel of this camera is that it only records HD to the P2 card and, at full resolution DVCPro HD, it only records about 10 minutes of video on the currently available P2 cards before you have to dump to a hard drive and clear the card (bigger cards will be available in the future.) There is a MiniDV tape mechanism in the camera, but it only records SD video - there is no HDV-to-tape option.

My production training was done with film cameras, so I’m used to the idea of breaking up the work into 10 minute chunks - that’s a pretty typical record time for a reel of film. I was fully prepared to adjust my working style to accomodate this limitation. I was expecting to wear a portable hard drive on a belt and dump the footage to disc as I went. But, when I did the math, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to store enough footage on the available portable drives to manage a typical project.

I often spend 2 or 3 days in the field recording interviews and generating anywhere from 6 to 10 hours of footage. Usually I’m working out of the back of a rented mini-van with limited assistance. I would need to have portable back-up drives, a laptop, and power supplies in tow to keep up with the data, plus a robust back-up solution back at the office for archiving. It was just a bad fit.

My HDV Camcorder Solution

The Sony HVR-Z1U turned out to be the best solution for my needs (read DigitalContentProducer.com’s Review.) Since most of my work is interviews, the limitations of HDV compression should not be a problem. The tape stock is cheap, easy to find, and a built-in archiving solution. When they become available, I’ll get a Focus Enhancements Firestore FS-4 HD Pro hard disk recorder for direct to disk recording. I’ll just have to get used to using a tripod for everything and stay away from handheld work - the quick set-up capabilities of the Sachtler tripod I ordered should make this transition less disruptive to my typical run-and-gun shooting style.

I ordered the camera with a full accessory kit (mattebox w/rails, filter set, tripod, HDV VTR, tripod, field monitor, shotgun mike, LCD camera light, travel case, and lots of extra batteries.) Look for an article soon about my experiences setting-up this new kit and shooting test footage. I took lots of photos.

The Bottom Line

There is a ton of cool gear out there. You can spend all day staring at the features of the various solutions. But, ultimately, it is the needs of your productions that must drive your decisions. I’m sure I’ll use the AG-HVX200 at some point, but it was the wrong solution for this need.

Does anyone out there need a DP for a project that will be on the AG-HVX200? Call me! I’m ready to go.
The Go-To Guy!

Let me start off by saying, “I Love Jamba Juice!” A fruit smoothie with a couple protein and vitamin boosts is my favorite way to start the day. They’ve even got a few combos with green tea for a little caffeine kick. But, at $5-$6 a piece, they are a special treat and not a daily habit.

My wife likes anything that gets me to have breakfast. Fruit, juice, protein and vitamins count as a meal - even if I drink it. But she draws the line at $6 a day too. So, for Christmas, she got me the coolest little gadget:

Hamilton Beach Personal Blender

This great little gadget is designed to make single serving smoothies that you drink out of the blender cup. The base of the cup is flat and shaped to fit in a cupholder. It even comes with a special travel lid so you can drink out of it.

Get 120 Delicious and Energizing
Smoothie Recipes

Once I had my new blender, I noted the basic ingredients of my favorite Jamba Juice blends, went to the grocery store and loaded up on frozen fruit and bottles of fruit juice. I made a special booster blend of protein, flax meal, and wheat germ (my wife went a step further and pre-mixed a big jar of this so I only need to scoop out a few spoonfuls from one container!) For the price of one Jamba Juice I get three or four. In the first week I saved enough money to pay for the cost of the blender and had a smoothie every day. Now the Jamba Juice is a special treat for when I’m traveling or have had a busy day.

If your looking to satisfy your smoothie craving, I highly recommend this handy little blender.

The Go-To Guy

P.S. I’ve left a comment below that describes the basic “recipe” I use for my smoothies. If you have a favorite of your own, leave a comment and add it to the list. Thanks!

This week’s big project was creating a DVD of promotional highlight videos to be distributed to the members of a corporate board of directors. The videos were all previously edited projects, so I just had to create a menu and get all of the clips linked up. I used Adobe Encore DVD for authoring the DVD and Adobe Photoshop CS2 to create the DVD menu and the label for the disc. The real fun started when I had to run 50 copies of the finished product!

Check out this awesome little gadget! It’s the Primera Bravo Pro CD/DVD duplicator. The IT department at the company I’m working for bought this a few months ago to handle the media duplication requests that they are always getting dumped with. I have a good relationship with the IT folks, so they let me use the equipment when I need to. My project required 50 DVDs with nicely printed labels - perfect for my first use of the duplicator.

I’d never touched the machine before I showed up with my master disc and JPEG of the label, so I expected to have a few problems getting everything to work. That wasn’t the case. The Primera software was very simple to figure out and I had my job set up and ready to go within 10 minutes. I used the included label software to create a label template from the JPEG and then linked to that template in the duplicating software. With the source DVD in the computer’s disc drive and the quantity set to 50, I hit the burn button.

If you’ve got a geek-streak in you (and I do!) there are few things cooler than robots. This machine is supposed to free me up from swapping discs when making copies, but instead of running off to other tasks, I stood there watching as the robotic picker grabbed fresh discs and popped them into the burners and then printed labels on the copies before dumping them into the catch bin and popping in another batch of fresh discs. When the novelty wore off I finally went back to work, but I love watching this thing go.

I only had 2 problems during the process. The first disc’s label had a small section at the beginning of the print area where the ink wasn’t coming out properly. In my experience, this happens with almost any inkjet printer that doesn’t see everyday use. Running a quick head cleaning diagnostic would have taken care of that (or just plan for one or two discs at the beginning that are for testing.) The second problem was my own fault, I left one of the clear protective discs that come on the spindle with the blank discs in the stack. The robotic arm couldn’t grab it, so the job paused until I cleared this out and restarted the process. The Bravo Pro picked up where it left off.

My finished product impressed everyone. I love my DVD Buring Robot!

The Go-To Guy!

I’m preparing myself for the next wave of video production. I decided that it’s not worth my while to invest in any new hardware/software that is not capable of handling HD. While there is still going to be a while before most people can view an HD image on their home TV, I want to make sure I don’t have to buy all new gear when I want to make an indie film with the potential for a film-out or HD projection in a theater.

The first step is to see what’s out there. I’m lucky to live in Manhattan. There are always product demos and seminars coming through town. This week I attended an HDV seminar put on by VASST and Sony, and a Matrox/Adobe demo of the AXIO HD solution.

The folks at VASST were very helpful in explaining the nuts and bolts of dealing with HDV footage. They demonstrated everything with Sony Vegas, which seemed to be a very robust solution for editing. I’ve played around with Vegas, but don’t have much incentive for learning another edit suite. Douglas Spotted Eagle did the presentation and really knows HDV and Vegas. His book on HDV is an excellent resource.

VASST has also created a number of very useful plugins for Vegas. Their Gearshift software is essential if you want to downconvert your HDV to SD for editing.

Mannie and Spot were very helpful and knowledgable. They spent a great deal of time answering questions on breaks and after the session. Thanks.

Earlier this spring I attended an Adobe HDV seminar. They demonstrated the Adobe Video Collection software. In addition to explaining the workflows of HDV in the Adobe software, they gave a number of very helpful tips and techniques for navigating this amazing collection of software. They didn’t need to sell me - I recently upgraded to the Pro Suite. They just made me even more glad that I bought the software.

The demo that I attended today was focused on the Matrox AXIO HD solution that uses the Adobe Video Collection as the software to drive the Matrox hardware. This system is rock solid. They showed some tricky footage and the images were pristine - no color banding or video noise. The performance was also excellent - no latency in the timelines or when tweaking effects settings. Watching 2 streams of uncompressed HD running with effects and 2 layers of graphics was impressive.

The AXIO HD solution is intended to be a turnkey solution, so Matrox doesn’t sell the hardware seperately. You’ve got to work with an integrater to build the system and they only use HP PC’s. This is not a do-it-yourselfer’s system. And, it’s not cheap (it’s also not the most expensive solution by a longshot either.)

The AXIO system can be purchased in an SD version which can later be upgraded to HD. The only change is the Breakout Box (BOB.) One downside is that you have to chose between the HD or SD BOB - you can’t have both at the same time. Another thing that I asked them to put on the wish list was to include HD down conversion with the SD version so that users could take advantage of HDV before they were ready to trade up and buy new decks and monitors. Since the processing cards are the same for both versions, it should be possible to take advantage of the HD processing power without having to buy the more expensive BOB and it’s SDI connectors. Avid is doing this with it’s Express HD + Mojo solution (I just don’t like the rest of the software in their production suite. They just don’t compare to having Photoshop, Encore, After Effects and Audition. I need a very compelling reason to give up the tight integration of those applications with the Premiere Pro NLE.)

The Matrox and Adobe reps were also very helpful and knowledgable. They took the time to listen to my needs and were honest about the capabilities of their system.

I still haven’t made up my mind about what the best solution for an HD suite is. I’d like to try out one of the Black Magic Designs HD cards in conjunction with the Adobe Video Collection. Their top card handles 4:4:4 uncompressed HD i/o with the ability to downconvert to SD for display (and monitor the HD and SD feeds at the same time.) If the performance of this solution is anywhere near the AXIO HD - my next system will be a 64bit Dual Core PC with the Black Magic card and the Adobe Video Collection. I’ll take the money I saved and buy an HD monitor and a few Terabytes of storage.