1. Don’t over expose the screen. Under exposed screen is better than over exposed. Too bright increases spill and decreases saturation. One stop under is okay.
2. Light screen evenly with softboxes/diffusers. Check with light meter within 1/4 F-stop variation and all same temperature.
3. Avoid using dimmers on screen light (talent is okay); they create flicker, which may not key every other frame. If dimmers must be used, test in keyer on-set before shooting.
4. Turn off any in -camera color gain or filters, sharpening or detail. Don’t forget to set white balance!
5. Place talent as far from screen as possible to avoid spill. Light talent separately to match planned backplate, avoid unwanted light spill and shadows on screen. Don’t use colored backlights to reduce spill. Turn off the screen lights after everything is lit to see actual talent lightning.
6. Use blocking tape with color close to screen so they both key in one pass. Use tracking marks with similar, not exact, color when crossed by talent or a contrasting color for better tracking results if track marks will not be crossed by talent. They can be garbage matted out later.
7. Avoid interlaced footage if possible. It’s just one less hassle in post.
8. Keep talent in focus, especially if using compressed footage (focus/depth can be stimulated in post). Screen out of focus is okay.
9. Keep screen as clean as possible. Dirt won’t key and must be removed by hand. Wear booties, or roll out brown paper when working.
10. All problems can be fixed in post if a sufficient amount of money is available.

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The Film-directors had dinner with their Scandinavian and Baltic colleagues at Villa Kivi.

Finnish Movie-directors’ association SELO had asked Talvi to sponsor / co-host the dinner..

Thus the directors also got a brief presentation of the RED CAM and discussed the digital Medias as a part of the movie-making process today.

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We at Talvi were honored to have director Matti Kassila visit us!

The mood was relaxed and inspired while we got to know each other and discussed a multitude of subjects, including the beloved inspector Palmu-movies, the RED camera and state-of-the-art visual effects.

More after the jump!

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Artbeats has begun to shoot stock footage with the RED One. Here’s a pdf that explains how Artbeats is using the RED One camera to create high-resolution clips for its stock footage library.

Artbeats on the RED

There is a great article at Creative Cow about how to expose for the RED camera. David Battistella, REDtrepreneur, early adopter and obsessed student of the RED camera system takes a closer look at how to hit the sweet spot on the RED sensor. 

Take a look at it here.

Here’s the trailer for the Nicholas Cage film Knowing. It was shot using the Red One and it looks very impressive.

Knowing-trailer

Finally Apple has released a prores decoder for Windows. It won’t allow encoding – that would be too easy – but it does help with our workflows as we can get one conversion out of the way.

Get it here:

Apple prores for Windows

“Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier” Google released new browser for windows. its at the moment Windows only. : ) So far What I have tested it seams faster than Firefox and works well. Even with this blog! Google owns us all!

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How sharp is your color sense?

Our Visual Effects Supervisor Henri Pulla got a perfect score and even I, a web guy managed to miss just 7.

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