As part of my push to extend the capabilities of our little multimedia studio, i have been wanting to get new studio lighting.
This week i was lent a pair of Rotolight Titan X1 &X2 rgb led studio lights to demo…thank you Rotolight!
Before you think i have gone totally off Flame topic…one of the main reasons i wanted to test these lamps is the 16million colour light output these beasts have…and a little thing i have been wondering about for a while…namely do you need a green wall or drape for a decent key?
I now know you don’t! Blasting our white wall with a pure green from the X2, and using the X1 to light the blonde subject sat in a chair 7-8 feet away from the wall i recorded a few different shots on my BMPCC4K camera using braw, brought them into Flame and was really surprised at how quickly and cleanly i could pull a decent key using Masterkey.
These lights are expensive, but damn…good enough to convince me to ask the boss to buy me a stack of them.
If you ever need a thoroughly flexible light solution i would definitely check them out, or borrow one from a rental house.
Yeah, it can totally be done. I’d only trust it to be done safely if you’re directly involved in shooting it, like you are here. If a random production company suggested this on a prepro call I would likely run screaming.
I rarely do greenscreens so i am not very good at them - this is a very simple one click key using masterkeyer. The original footage is on right, result in middle and the basic unrefined matte on left!
Coloured background is a simple gradient and the foreground has been slightly graded. You can see the bottom half of the lamp thats outputting the green, just to the left.
not too much. Made sure we had the green source and the wall behind the model (my assistant Luke!) Wall is approx 10ft behind the chair, and the lamp is about 7ft from the wall.
and this one is me…a slightly more refined key because of all the green on my shirt…but as a proof of concept i’m sold!
and very little problem with spill.
for the purists, getting close in on the 4k image from this camera does show its struggling with very high definition…but as all our output is headed for 1080p and for web usage, its not an issue for me. The image is very usable for 95% of my needs.
