Ultra Newbie Needs a Little Help
by Andy Bernstein
on
Dec 7, 2007 at 6:52:33 pm
Hello. I just bought Ultra 2 and am trying to put together my first green screen shoot. I have a separate post in the lighting design forum about the lighting we'll need, and would like some help here with video cameras that work well with Ultra and keying.
We have a Panasonic 3CCD mini DV camera (PV-GS250) but I'm considering upgrading to a better camera. I've heard great things about the Canon HV20. Obviously there are also more expensive options if I wanted to spend $5000. But if you were going to get a camera just for producing online videos with green screen effects, what would you get? I don't want to waste money, but I also want the results to look good.
Re: Ultra Newbie Needs a Little Help by Danny Hays on Dec 13, 2007 at 8:37:12 pm
I uses a Sony HVR-A1U HDV camera with Ultra 2 and Sony Vegas. I also turn my camera 90 deg to the right on my tripod for full body shots. This way I'm not wasting resoultion on un-usable sides that would neet to be cropped out. You can turn the video back upright in your NLE. Vegas 7 and up come with Cineforn intermetiate so convert all your needed M2T files to this 1st as Ultra wont work with M2T files without the full Cineform licence. I use Ultra for all my keying as 32 bit AVI with alpha and then piece them all together in Vegas.
Here's a sample on YouTube where I won a CMT greenscreen contest. Hope this helps, Danny,, FYI, these are higher resoultion than YouTube normally streams so click the pause button and let the buffer meter fill before playing. A small inconvenience for getting a good quality video to play on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/ErnestDaniels
Re: Ultra Newbie Needs a Little Help by Tim Kolb on Dec 15, 2007 at 3:35:16 pm
Typically a 3 sensor camera should give you a better image than a single sensor, particularly for greenscreen work, but going from DV to HDV isn't a bad idea even if it means going to a single sensor camera as the way the image is compressed is actually a bit better for keying.
As with anything though...you have a camera and I'd do a test with it first to see if it meets your needs before spending any money.
