What was my Canon C300 mk ii green screen mistake ?!?

[davidlondon]

Hi,

I was shooting in a green screen studio that had a Canon C300 mkii as part of the deal.  The lights are pretty much pre set on the pro-background.

I set the camera to 1080p 500 iso 4:4:4 12 bit..and it all looked fine on the monitor. I didn't change any other settings as this camera is a dedicated green screen camera.

Next day I put the footage in After Effects and it keys terribly, really noisy . No grain is noticeable until I add Keylight, or the spill suppressor then bam..there it is. It's like I shoot it at 20,000 iso ??

I was looking forward to an improved keying experience with 4:4:4....so what did I do wrong ? What did I miss ? Or is it my After Effects settings ? [ maybe that's a different forum]

Any advice or answers would be gratefully received..

David

 

[BenEricson]

I've shot with this same setup before and had great results. Where is the noise located? On the skin / subject or the background. 

I think you will need to post a still for anyone to give you any real advice. 

I've had good results with the updated color key filter in Premiere CC.

[kaylee]

yeah, post a still pal

[fuzzynormal]

It sounds like something you're doing wrong in your post work flow.

[fuzzynormal]

5 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

It sounds like something you're doing wrong in your post work flow.

Well, I guess I should qualify that to say if you had an improper shooting set up and your footage is bad, then it might not be a post problem. 

[HockeyFan12]

That can be a pretty noisy camera, if you underexposed just a bit it might be just that. 

Try using neat video. Might help a lot.

[davidlondon]

Hi,

thanks for writing. Here's the images first from the camera direct , a flat profile no editing. The second is the key, I've just done this quickly so I know it's not perfect but you can see the main body of the white area is clean. And on the final picture the noise comes in on the darker wood and seat areas plus the strings.

It's on a 16 bit channel, I tried 32 bit didn't make a difference.. I have done  green screen before, I added the key to show I'm not making a basic error.

It actually appears that adding keylight , or a spill suppressor ..makes the footage grainy ?  I hope it's my workflow, then I can correct it . I've not used 4:4:4 footage before.. ? Thinking out loud..possible codec issue ?

Thanks again for getting involved ,

David

[HockeyFan12]

This is not so bad. I don't think you did anything wrong, it might be a half stop underexposed but not that bad.

Those strings are a bit tricky though...

If you were to reshoot, I would rate the camera at around 160 ISO, whatever the lowest ISO is before highlights clip. That will get the shadows super clean and a nice thick image to work with. Cinema cameras generally don't apply denoising to the image (or look like garbage if they do) so you can get a much noisier image from a C300 MK II than for instance an A7S.

Buy Neat Video, watch a few tutorials, and apply it before the key. It will slow your render down and cost $100 or something but it will also solve these problems. You will probably want to regrain after keying even. The data you need is there, you can get a clean key.

Or try setting Keylight to "intermediate result" and using the spill suppressor plug in set to advanced and colorpicker green. It can look a bit less noisy but won't solve a dancing key.

 

[kaylee]

hey guys, forgive my ignorance (rlly)

isnt there some jpg-y compression going on here, particularly by the subjects face...? is that normal for a c300 II?

[HockeyFan12]

44 minutes ago, kaylee said:

hey guys, forgive my ignorance (rlly)

isnt there some jpg-y compression going on here, particularly by the subjects face...? is that normal for a c300 II?

I assumed it was from the web compression.

[davidlondon]

yes, the JPEG compression is from making the jpeg for the page.

I have assumed user error . The base sensitivity is ISO 850...so ISO 500 shouldn't have added in noisy ?

Is there a button/menu setting that's a 'super gain boost' I may have hit ? Maybe an assigned button ? There was nothing on the display that indicated it.

Thanks for reading..

 

 

[mrtreve]

It does look a bit underexposed. It's best to fill up the waveform as much as you can without clipping to get clean results. I've had good results by lighting the green screen at about 60% IRE (in a rec709 profile). If you have to turn up the gain in Keylight it starts to eat into the rest of the image and makes things grainy.

I think those strings are going to be touch either way as they're quite thin and with sort of blend in with the green. So if you do reshoot - It might actually be worth shooting this in 4K. You can pull good keys with 422 material. You could also up the shutter speed a bit to get less motion blur.

Maybe one thing you could try is to transcode to prores in case AE is having a problem with the codec. I used to own a C300II and can vaguely remember some occasional issues with the 444 codec in Adobe. I think it's an RGB file instead of YUV so maybe it's something to do with that.