Reflecmedia's LiteRing/Chromatte w/ Red

[Jason Ing]

I was considering using this in a small room to prevent having to deal with spill. Has anyone tried this with Red? Or have opinions on it. Thanks.

 

[Jim Hoffman]

http://reflecmedia.com/

I've seen a demo but never had one in my hands to test - the idea looks good - I wonder about colorization from the lightsource on the subject.

 

[martinnoweck]

Jing,

as i am still waiting for my red to come i had no chance to test with the red one.

I used reflecmedia last year in combination with a HVX200. We wanted to shoot string puppets in front of greenscreen - problem was: the arms of the puppet player were to short to avoid spill. We thought about building a stage, where the puppet player could lie above the puppets, but the artist refused because she was used to work standing.

That's the reason we decided to use reflecmedia.

If i remember right you still should keep 1-2 meters distance from the "greyscreen", not because of spill but because of optical artefacts. We kept a distance of 50cm and it worked fine.
The ideal distance between camera (and litering) and object should be around 4m - same reason. You will get some odd shadows and some green light on the object if you come to close.

We approximated about 2m, if you are getting closer you get some green flares on the object.

You should use a good keyer, for example Primatte /Ultimatte or Matinee to get good results. Standard software keyer (for example avid built in keyer) will bring inferior results.

The results with the hvx200 were good, so i expect the results with the red being marvellous ;-)

regards,
martin

 

[JFirestone]

I've been working with the reflect media stuff since back when it first came out from Play as the Holoset. We even built a custom green ring, before they had released one. We were also working with puppets and it works pretty well. I have camera 232 now, and I have 2 Blue rings. They are the older Holoset branded ones, but they are the same thing. I'll try to get some test done in the next couple of days and post them at http://www.redrelay.net/owners/0232/ .

Jon Firestone
Denver Colorado
#232

 

[Jason Ing]

That's great! Thanks! I'm looking forward to seeing the footage. I suspect it will be as good as a regular blue/green screen minus the spill problem. I read that the angle of the camera to the screen is pretty sharp (in a good way) as well, but I'll have to look into this more. So far, so good then to building my mini studio in my living room, lol. Thanks again.

 

[JFirestone]

We already posted some traditional blue and green screen footage that we lit with both tungsten and daylight on that site, so there should be some good comparisons. If I can I'll try both tungsten and daylight again with the holoset, and I might be able to borrow the green ring from my brother. I'll see what I can do.

Jon Firestone
Denver, Colorado
#232

 

[Casey Green]

I used to work for Play and demonstrated and shot with the Holoset (Chromatte) quite a bit. I have both blue and green ring kits and brought it to the Los Angeles RED Test (LART).

I shot some tests there with the blue ring because my green ring was too small to fit on the lens. (They make various size LED rings). So we should be seeing those results fairly soon.

The Chromatte is a nice option to have in certain situations, since you are lighting the backdrop with the LEDs and not traditional lights. This allows you more flexibility since you don't have to have lights dedicated to getting rid of shadows on the BG.

There are caveats however, such as anything very reflective (chrome, eye glasses must be angled), talent must get used to the LED lights, can sometimes interfere with other on-camera accessories (certain teleprompter setups, etc) and distance requirements (the system has a dimmer box for dialing down the spill in low light / closeup situations)...

But overall, a good way to quickly setup a professional key in a matter of minutes. I shot a bunch of promos for Budweiser on Chromatte and they loved the results.

 

[Rich Schaefer]

I have to ask you guys who have used the system, can you still light you subject any way you want, or do they end up flat?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Working with Casey's setup at LART, I have to say it actually worked very well. There do seem to be some draw-backs though.. Light on the Chromatte fabric was a bit splotchy, but some of this was due to wrinkles or creases. It keys nice though, I've found just about anything shot with RED that is half-way exposed right will key just fine. Spill wasn't bad, but your subject has to be somewhat close to the fabric compared to what you can pull off with a traditional blue/green screen setup. It's not a solution for every sitation, but has the advantage of being compact or portable. The only light illuminating the screen can be the LED ring, which helps in setting up quick. I can probably post a frame grab from the LART shoot showing this at some point. I haven't seen anyone else posting grabs or clips from LART yet, so I'd better hold off. ...We did shoot the Chromatte fabric with the prototype RED 50-150 though. Used Blair's #19 REDcam and Tonaci set it up. He gets top honors for shooting one of the few clips where the focus was dead-on.

 

[Larry McKee]

I have to ask you guys who have used the system, can you still light you subject any way you want, or do they end up flat?

I have used the Reflecmedia system for numerous national and internationally aired TV spots. It will totally spoil you. You don't have to worry about lighting the BG at all. The ring light takes care of it for you. You just light the subject the way you need to in order to match the BG you will add later. The compositions look totally believable and seamless.

 

[Casey Green]

I have to ask you guys who have used the system, can you still light you subject any way you want, or do they end up flat?

Yes, infact, thats the great part of keying this way... you are only lighting for your talent or subject, rather than having to light the background as well. You can actually do a candle light key quite easily.

Working with Casey's setup at LART, I have to say it actually worked very well. There do seem to be some draw-backs though.. Light on the Chromatte fabric was a bit splotchy, but some of this was due to wrinkles or creases. It keys nice though, I've found just about anything shot with RED that is half-way exposed right will key just fine. Spill wasn't bad, but your subject has to be somewhat close to the fabric compared to what you can pull off with a traditional blue/green screen setup. It's not a solution for every sitation, but has the advantage of being compact or portable. The only light illuminating the screen can be the LED ring, which helps in setting up quick.

The fabric from the kit I used at LART was actually quite old, so it was a bit worn and wrinkled. But the wrinkles don't cause too much of a problem, since the fabric has thousands of tiny glass beads embedded into it which reflect the light directly back at the source, regardless of the angle. The wear and tear of being rolled up, stood upon, folded when in a hurry, etc, cause the beads to wear off after a long time.

As for the subject standing close or far from the material, it really doesn't make too much of a difference. The main factor is the LED's (Camera) distance from the material and the brightness setting of the LED Ring (and, of course, Camera settings).

...I can probably post a frame grab from the LART shoot showing this at some point. I haven't seen anyone else posting grabs or clips from LART yet, so I'd better hold off. ...We did shoot the Chromatte fabric with the prototype RED 50-150 though. Used Blair's #19 REDcam and Tonaci set it up. He gets top honors for shooting one of the few clips where the focus was dead-on.

I'm looking forward to the results. I was very happy to have Tonaci as my operator - he definitely nailed focus. I wanted to get some closeups, since a lot of our other tests had not been focusing on that. I believe we also shot some with the RED 18-50mm. Hopefully we'll all get to see the footage on Vuze very soon... I actually thought we'd see something by last weekend, so it's gotta be close.

 

[Jason Ing]

Wow, thanks everyone for the info!

Question regarding focus: Does having a shallow depth of field effect the difficulty of pulling a matte if the edge of the actor is out of focus or does the entire actor have to be in the depth of field and completely in focus? I hope this makes sense.

 

[JFirestone]

Lite Ring r3d files

Lite Ring r3d files

OK I finally got a chance to shoot and upload a couple r3d files using some reflect media type setup. These were actually done with an old Holoset system, and a home made green ring. I only had a few minutes to put this together, and I have had issues getting my 5600 blue ring test to upload, so you only get the others for now. This is by no means a definitive test, and was done hastily. The tests done at LART are probably much more comprehensive and definitive. This was me doing a quick test, for myself, and passing the footage onto other eager RED users, who want a chance to do some experimenting of their own. Once again, I am not trying to step on the toes of anyone involved in LART, I am very interested in seeing and hearing their results. This was done as a quick test only, and I hope that it is useful to someone. Just a note about the ring light systems. They do create a darkened halo around the subject because some of the LEDs will be blocked by the subject. The size of this halo is dependent on the distance of the subject from the screen and the ring. I did some other tests with the subject that have the subject closer to the background as well, but I have not posted them. Some people can get great keys from ring lights, some people hate them. You use different techniques. Another quick note is that my white balance seems a little off. I used 3200 and 5600 settings on the camera, and they seem a little more blue than I would expect, but you can alter the white balance in RedCine, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. The files can be found at http://www.redrelay.net/owners/0232/ .

 

[Jason Ing]

Thanks JFirestone! I didn't know about the halo. I don't see it as a problem, but I'll test it. Thanks again!

 

[Philip Powell]

Interesting

Interesting

I only did a quick demo with the chromatte a few years back, the only problem I had was I wanted a hot backlight all the way around the talent and since the backing had to be so close to the talent, it was hard to get lights placed that gave us a full "head to toeish" rim without contaminating the background fabric...anybody else had this problem?

OK..silly question (cause I honestly never knew) are the lights with the halo rings 3200 or 5600K, or both?

From the Red's standpoint I would still thing you would want to shoot nearer to 5600 for cleaner keys.

Also, as I understand it, you can't use too much wattage with your talent as it starts to comepete with the halo ring. Is that right?

 

[Jason Ing]

so if a light hits the background, that will affect the reflected chroma light in an adverse way?

 

[shalom]

Chromatte Reflecmedia + still images

Chromatte Reflecmedia + still images

Does anyone have any experience with using Chromatte Reflecmedia for stills? My concern was that Reflecmedia might not be able to perform well in extremely high resolution, but what I'm hearing from Red users is that everyone's getting good results with the system. However, high-resolution still images seem to be the ultimate test, since it's only one, single frame that's created and viewed for a long time. No room for error there. If anyone's used the Chromatte system for photography in addition to using it with the Red, I'd love to hear about their experience.

 

[Jason Ing]

high res? red is 4k.

 

[nacamera]

Jing,
We've been renting the Reflecmedia rings & screens to a wide variety of clients for over a year now, and I have personally used the system for over 2 years in a variety of situations. While I haven't done extensive testing I have put the ring up on our newly arrived Red (#1234) and the results looked stunning. The Reflecmedia system was second to none already, but then add in the extreme bandwidth of the Red, and you've got a very winning combination.

 

[Jason Ing]

cool. thanks for the insight!