From the course: Video Gear

Studio lighting for greenscreen projects

From the course: Video Gear

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Studio lighting for greenscreen projects

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- So Rich, we've talked about a permanent green screen installation with the hard site here behind us at the Media Factory Studios where we are in Washington D.C., but I'm also wondering about lighting. When you think about green screen lighting it's, well, pretty important. - Yeah. - So the thing that's always kind of driven me a little bit crazy is when I walk into a studio and there's movable lighting, and almost by definition movable lighting that's on the ground, on the c-stand or something like that is hard to get consistency out of from day to day. Would you agree? - Absolutely. One of the things we're trying to do this studio space is make it consistent so if people have to come back and shoot or do multiple green screen projects ideally, even if they shoot on different days, they should be able to get the same settings working across the jobs. Now, this is of course never perfect, but the more we can make it lock down the better. So we've started hanging a grid here. The studio's just about set up all the way, but what we've gone ahead and done is made sure that the lights are attached and mounted in position because once we get the background right it shouldn't need to change. The walls not moving. - Why do the lights need to change, right? - Exactly. - I think that's a good point. The thing about really good green screen work in really good studios is that when you walk in, you turn the lights on, maybe adjust your settings, but be able to repeat those settings from day to day, and that's exactly what we have here. We have lighting that's being hung from the ceiling, we know down to the number of the intensity, the color temperature, etc., what those lights need to be set at to get good results. - We wanted them to be DMX controllable. This is going to allow us to patch them into a lighting board so we can make adjustments. And I wanted something that had precise numerical output not little dials that you turned, but the ability to dial it in to the exact number with temperature and intensity. Rob, why is that important? - Repeat-ability Rich, exactly. That's what we want. I want to be able to go in every single day and go, hey look, I'm at 62,000 Kalvin or whatever it may be, I'm at this intensity of the light and be able to dial that in. You mentioned the control-ability of that. I think that's an important thing to mention is that having somebody on set who is in charge of this lighting grid and can double-check the consistency and can double-check the repeat-ability of that is huge. You mentioned that the lights we have hung up here, these are actually from a company called ikan, and the thing I like about them is, as you said, they're precise. I can dial them the exact color temperature, I can even adjust individual RGB channels. That's huge when you really need to dial something in and need to tweak it. The other thing I like about them is that they do have memory banks on them so you can store configurations in a memory bank. The other thing I like about them is that they're a typical yoke mount. That yoke mount is really flexible for hanging at different angles, tilts, things of that nature. - So, what we've done here is we've hung those lights, you can see that there getting us a nice, even key. Why don't we bring in a subject, we'll run some test footage here and show you a couple of things you can do onset during that set-up to make sure that the background is tweaked correctly and that you're going to get footage that will key easily.

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