It’s been forever since I’ve keyed Phantom footage.
Has anything changed in that world in the last 10 years? Phantom Tech is still super important position on set, right? Is black balancing still a thing?
Things to consider:
- Do the lights flicker due to high frame rate?
- Consider doing an on-set edit to make sure that your action and frame rate will work in the edit. I always have a Flame on-set so I can capture and edit while we shoot, but this might be considered a luxury
- It is not a color-managed workflow. I transcode .cine files to rec709 as they are.
Company3 colorists prefer them to be transcoded as log2 with an offset of 10 for black definition (I don’t know why they don’t use original .cine files). - Phantom cameras do not reproduce color accurately. We tried to shoot a green light bar, it turned out white. Only after turning the intensity of the device down did we manage to read any color on the Phantom and it shifted to cyan.
- Although not ideal for keying I have done my fair share of chroma with it.
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Not to mention it’s bizarre handling of timecode. The hour shifts based on where it was shot.
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Timecode? Whats that?
That’s wild, right?
I had to set my computer’s time zone to EST before transcoding so the timecode would match the XML.
-Ted
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Would you guys go for digi green or chroma green? @Sinan ? Brighter green (digi) or darker green (chroma)?
I would go chroma/darker green. Phantom is already stripping off some edge detail.
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What about fine hair detail? Should we cast brunettes? Blondes OK?
I would prefer brunettes to be on the safe side. Maybe it’s going to be almost the same with the edge detail but still…
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dont tell me they run a phantom on the set you are at right now 
Yup. Phantom. But only because the clients like the clipped highlights and noisy footage.
why not blue for brown or blonde hair.
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This is my experience as well @TimC, blonde hair has a lot of green in it already.
I dunno. I’m scared about Phantom and blue screen. @sinan? Thoughts?
Ummm, don’t know really. I’ll check tomorrow with the camera guys and shoot some blue if the camera’s in.
I checked our masters and remembered that we did shoot a commercial with blue screen. It worked out OK. It might make sense to use it for hair detail. Check out this making of video…
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I have to say @Sinan , spot looks great! but what I’m most impressed with is the Occam’s razor approach of shooting practically for rig removal. I’m sure there were headaches, but I feel like so many people nowadays would just jump to cg with some of these shots because they could.
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