The Green Screen Handbook, as its name implies, is a comprehensive how-to guide for working with green screen compositing technology. Its aim is to provide you with professional production techniques, step-by-step instruction, and tips that can save you both time and money while not only showing you how to do something, but also why you would want to do it this way.
The goal of The Green Screen Handbook is to show you how the pros operate in real-world professional studios to get fantastic results even when shooting on a tight budget. It covers the range of green and blue screen production workflows of big screen studios, live TV broadcasts, independent filmmakers, and small budget student projects. This book is 384 pages divided into 19 chapters.
Chapter 1, "Mattes and Compositing Defined," begins with a look back at the history of the traveling matte - the early days before it was introduced as well as how the process evolved to what it is today. Chapter 2, "Digital Matting Methods and Tools," starts off by defining the difference between using green screen as opposed to blue screen. Then you will explore hardware compositors, as well as software and plugins that you can use to create your production.
Chapter 3, "Basic Shooting Setups," looks at the foundational elements that are needed for green screen setups that include the materials, lighting of both background and foreground as well as how they are positioned in relation to each other. Chapter 4, "Basic Compositing Techniques," now examines matting compositing techniques through the use of software solutions. Here you will examine various techniques of software chroma keying in Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects.
Chapter 5, "Simple Setups on a Budget," examines how you can reasonable results without all the expensive gear and high-end video camera. Here you will see how to use the same principles that are used in a professional studio, but with low cost lighting solutions. Chapter 6, "Green Screens in Live Broadcasts," now takes a look at how the typical newsroom does green screen, here the author takes a trip to a local news station to see how green screen is used in the real world for live broadcasts.
Chapter 7, "How the Pros Do It," investigates what it is like to work at a large visual effects (VFX) studio. In this chapter you will take a tour of one of the top VFX studios in California and see some of the making of HBO's John Adams. You will also see how Indie filmmakers accomplish things when they don't have big budgets, and how Tim Hines produced effects for his indie version of War of the Worlds.
Article comments