The Magic of Chroma Key (Part 2)
In part 1 of our behind-the-scenes look at chroma keying, we covered humble beginnings and the nightmare’s encountered therein. In part 2, let’s look at how we solved some of the issues while creating ourselves some brand new ones.
Going Pro
We struggled on with the duvet cover for as long as we could (ironing it actually made a significant difference) but the truth is, it just wasn’t good enough. We made a total of 13 videos before giving in and purchasing a professional green / blue screen.
The new backdrop made its debut on the Italy preview show and the results were instantly impressive. The screen folds away inside a soft bag which means some creases are still apparent, but when opened it remains flat and is very luminous in colour, making post-processing a relative breeze.
On one side you get green material while the reverse is blue, meaning that if Christine decides to wear clothes of similar shade to the former, we simply flip the thing around. Life’s so much easier with the right tools isn’t it?
Why Do You Have to Go and Make Things So Complicated?
After a couple more straightforward videos we decided to try something a bit different, so during the off-season we made the Christmas Message video, which was particularly complicated because it was the first shoot we’d done with the host seated.
The newly acquired backdrop is 5ft by 7ft which is plenty big enough to film a large chair and its occupant, but we suffer from severe space restrictions meaning that all of the furniture had to be removed from the room just to get the video camera far enough away.
The shoot took two days meaning that the room was out of bounds during that period and seeing as some of the removed furniture included the bed, it meant sleeping in the living room until we were done. Oh yes, that’s how dedicated to the Sidepodcast cause we are. First we can’t sleep because the duvet cover’s hanging upright on the wall, and when we solve that problem, the bed leaves the room.
Camera Obscura
You may have noticed by now that Christine doesn’t appear to have any legs or feet in the videos and that’s purely down to problems with space. While the backdrop is willing and able, there’s simply no way we can move the camera enough distance away to fit a whole person in the viewfinder. For the time being we’re simply limited to half a person, whether they be sitting or standing.
One final thing to mention is that for the last two F1 Rewind show’s, we didn’t use chroma technology at all. We simply hung a plain backdrop from the ceiling and pointed a couple of pretty lights at the thing. The result means much less post processing work and that’s something we’re going to look more into in the future because backgrounds are taking us much longer this year.
In the past we spent a small fortune buying various images and movies from iStockphoto, this year we decided to make our own. How we’ve gone about doing that though, is a story for another day.
Any comments or questions on either of these two posts, please do shout us in the comments. We are all ears, and quite worryingly, are always here.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:50 pmThe Magic of Chroma Key (Part 1) | Sidepodcast : Your Weekly F1 Podcast said:
[...] seems like a pretty good place to end the first part of the Sidepodcast chroma key story. In part 2 we’ll look at how things improved once we bought ourselves a decent curtain. Written on May [...]
May 28th, 2008 at 6:19 pmChristine said:
Is there going to be a Part 3 - Where we learnt how to make the girl less shiny?
May 28th, 2008 at 6:27 pmme said:
that’ll be a new series… how to light a set using kitchen foil and blu tack.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:44 pmlou said:
wow, i have always wondered how you did the blue/ green screen stuff. Really interesting
thanks for the insight, I love the behind the scenes posts you do. 
Its nice your here so often, i mean you never see us complaining
I know i have said this soooo many times but we all really appreciate the time and effort you put into sidepodcast
May 28th, 2008 at 10:38 pmJeremy said:
I often choose to exaggerate for comedic effect, but I don’t think that love is too strong a word here.
I love what you do, and how well you do it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
May 28th, 2008 at 10:49 pmmy FA fantasy said:
Yeah, I vividly remember early days of Sidepodcast and that wonderful article on nasty bloke Fisi who refuses to let women in his racing academy. And the website colours were different (I think current scheme is fine).
Video production is a very sensitive thing. I use Windows Movie Maker to make my minimalist creations. You seem to be in a more advanced stage. And I guess for independent F1 press the real problem is where you get the damn footage to work with, it’s all copyright material, I mean millions of people at home (including me) record all the races (I normally keep one or two DVDs with blockbuster races - this year I kept Melbourne and Monaco, the rest was erased) and that’s ok, but when you want to illustrate your ideas on the internet Bernard says no. What if a photographer takes a pic of grandstands in Jerez and I’m gonna be sitting there? Does my body count like copyright material?
May 28th, 2008 at 11:00 pmSidepodcastFan said:
Fantastic insights in all of what you do best!…cheers!
A friend of mine bought this not too long ago. He has yet to try it @ a GP for compatibility with …………
May 28th, 2008 at 11:02 pmme said:
cheers jeremy.
i sort of hope someone might read this and think “hey, i have a blue duvet cover too. i wonder what i could create?”
May 28th, 2008 at 11:03 pmme said:
yeah, we took ourselves a bit seriously back then didn’t we? maybe we still do.
it is impossible. interestingly, while watching kathi’s mclaren videos, i noticed they actually had some race footage back then. i guess bernie’s had a change of heart.
i think you sign that away when you buy your ticket. along with every other human right the UN gives you
May 28th, 2008 at 11:11 pmme said:
appreciate that sidepodcastfan, and also cheers lou for your nice comments earlier.
May 28th, 2008 at 11:16 pmlou said:
May 28th, 2008 at 11:21 pmmy FA fantasy said:
Yeah, it looks like it! In Jerez all human beings have the same price tag - 5 euros, it used to be 3 euros before (really cheap human material); I’d be glad to sell out for a reasonable price at one of the racing weekends this year but Bernard has the habit of ripping off the tracks and they in turn start ripping off the fans. Kinda sad.
May 28th, 2008 at 11:54 pmJordan Allen said:
“Me” and Christine:
While the chroma keying articles are quite interesting, I would like to really know how you make sure that Christine’s shadow does not end up on the screen - so how many floodlights does that require and where do they go?
More interesting than all this stuff would be your experiments in getting all this stuff to work in a realistic way. That Spanish/European cast was a bit of a hash job in that the books in the background looked bigger than Christine and I heard rumours of a “Gopher-Cam” shot that Christine was not too please with as if Christine looked up, she would see the underside of the whatever car was in the footage….
I am actually surprized that “Me” has yet to pull off an inverted background for the Australian Grand Prix yet…. .
May 29th, 2008 at 12:08 amme said:
we have a “lighting” article planned for the future, so i don’t want to go into it in too much detail here, but basically they point from each side so shadows hit the side walls, not the backdrop. you can sort of see it the 2nd piccy.
sorry jordan, you’ve sort of lost me here, which video?
the what, the when and the who?
May 29th, 2008 at 12:13 amme said:
oh wait, you mean this one:
http://www.sidepodcast.com/2007/05/12/video-4-barcelona-preview/
i see what you mean, you would need a big bookshelf for those i imagine! in our defense, that was the 2nd preview video we tried. more worrying in that one is the audio quality. much improved nowadays.
we’ll get into the realism aspect when we cover how we create the background flags. we’ll try and write about that as soon as possible. the short answer is simple colour correction fixes most things.
still lost on the “Gopher-Cam” thing though, must’ve been a long time ago, right?
May 29th, 2008 at 12:45 amJordan Allen said:
Me:
That’s the one.
“Gopher-Cam” ==> Like I said, they were just rumours. “Gopher-Cam” is basically an idea from the old American Westerns (John Wayne, Clint Eastwood) of a brave cameraman or drunken cameraman, in a hole, filming an oncoming stampade of wild animals. The animals either go around or jump over the hole (and the cameraman.) As there seem to be no action shots of the undersides of the cars, this is how I knew that they were just rumours.
But seriously, there must have been some really cool outtakes while you where just experimenting with all of this stuff. You guys must have more toys than some of the local TV Stations around here….
May 29th, 2008 at 1:04 amme said:
yeah i wish we kept them! you name the emotion and we’ve probably been through it in the last 18 months.
the problem is tapes are really expensive, £100 sterling for three 60 minute cassettes, so we have to overwrite each week.
we could archive the content to hard drive, but that’s even more expensive because first there’s the time to encode it from the tape, and then you have hard drive storage costs (twice if you include backups).
in the end we had to make the decision to save only the usable stuff. i’m sure we’ll regret it though.
we’re operating on the worlds smallest budget! if we had the money you should see the list of things we could do with
May 29th, 2008 at 12:41 pmSteven Roy said:
Speaking of gopher cam whatever happened to the use of kerb cams in F1? Also why doesn’t someone build a camera into the tarmac on the grid. You would get some great shots from that.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:53 pmAlenyaa said:
Many thanks for these posts. Always nice and fun to read. Look forward to the next one already!
May 29th, 2008 at 12:54 pmme said:
i would hazard a guess and say that the sponsor logos are hard to read from that angle.
much better the super slo-mo replays to make sure we really see that branding.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:17 pmSteven Roy said:
I think I recognise a fellow cynic.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:05 pmRich said:
I agree with other comments - this [avoid face shadow] and getting a god clean quality of sound - I have yet to find a good microphone - the best is what comes with the Macs as their standard hardware. I think a really good podcast would be photographs/images of your toybox and telling us what each does!
May 29th, 2008 at 2:09 pmme said:
there’s a bunch of pics here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidepodcast/sets/72157601477549183/
we’ll take some more and do just that. i think we planned to do a video podcast about it, but i might have to wait until the summer break.
May 31st, 2008 at 11:13 pmTake a Step into Our World | Sidepodcast : Your Weekly F1 Podcast said:
[...] piece to camera for the video podcast Inside Track. We discussed what goes into that process earlier in the week and seeing as a few people found it interesting we thought we’d show you what actually goes [...]