23
Ghetto Greenscreen
I built a greenscreen for chroma keying video/photos in my studio for about 5 dollars. Grabbed about six sheets of neon-green poster board from a local store and used some other bits I had lying around; easel, cardboard, non-reflective tape, staple gun, duct tape…
You can see the result below! Admittedly ghetto… but for my current purposes, it will work just fine. You can see the seams in the photo but this isn’t a big deal as depth of field and After Effects can both be used to get around something like that. It’s large enough that I can place it a few feet behind the subject without issue, so blurring it with depth of field in the camera is probably a good option. You can see here that it’s pretty evenly lit without any special lighting- though I do have some lights to be used in case they are needed.
As a test, I grabbed this rabbit and snapped a quick photo.
After a few seconds of keying in After Effects – Parisian Rabbit.
17
CamStudio: Premiere/After Effects Solution
CamStudio 2.0 is a free screen capture tool that can be used in the creation of tutorials, demos, and such. You can configure it to either output a SWF or AVI file. I prefer AVI because it enables me to edit, add title screens, and do general production tasks before outputting to FLV for delivery. CamStudio gives the user quite a bit of flexibility in choosing the codec used to compress the video. One such codec is the “CamStudio Lossless Codec v1.0″ which does a fine job of maintaining high frame rates, while preserving small details and even rendering gradient washes correctly.
The trouble with the AVI files produced in this way is that when brought into Premiere Pro 2.0, the quality takes a nosedive. It seems that Premiere does not interpret the codec correctly and so renders a lot of black space (seemingly due to the encoded alpha channel) and really chunks up a huge portion of the video- the framerate is thrown off considerably as well. When attempting to “Interpret Footage”, turning off the alpha channel helps somewhat, but the framerate is still shot. However, performing the same action in After Effects Pro 7.0 actually does interpret the footage correctly! I am able to ignore the alpha channel when interpreting footage and everything renders great.
So if you are only doing light screencasting work and don’t want to spend the extra $$$ on something like Camtasia or Captivate, and assuming you already have Production Studio- this is a really fine solution.
EDIT: I have had good results using the LZOCodec v0.4 codec with CamStudio and then editing in Premier. You still need to interpret the footage by ignoring any alpha channel data, but the video will function properly on output.
About this Website
This is the website of Joseph Labrecque: Senior Multimedia Application Developer for the University of Denver and Owner of Fractured Vision Media, LLC. Joseph is an Adobe Higher Education Leader.
