A few months ago, I was approached by the good folks that run the .TV domain (Verisign, if you really want to know), to join their Advocate program. What this means for me is that I get a nice little gift and a bit of cash to basically do what I’ve already been doing for years: talk about making video on the web. I know, pretty sweet, right?

Well, to make things nice and easy for you, I’ve created a completely separate site for the Filmosity Video Blog. The URL is—surprise, surprise—http://www.filmosity.tv

On that blog, you’ll get some great video content, mostly about video creation and video marketing, but also about random stuff I encounter, including videos I shoot in my travels.

Here’s a little blurb from the Watch.tv blog announcing the .tv Advocate program:

We searched the web to see who was making amazing video, asked our friends for some recommendations and put together a wish-list of people we’d like to bring into the .tv community to offer tips and advice. We’ve got a great list, and are lucky to have them participate.

With the help from our panel of advocates who are making great video everyday, we will be delivering to you lots of great content to help you get started with online video if you’re a newbie, or offer up tips and tricks for you more experienced video creators.

Our panelist are incredible people from across the online video spectrum. Not only have they all been building fantastic presences using online video, but they’ve helped many brands be successful in an often intimidating medium. This means that our advocates know what questions both users and businesses have and can help get them up, running and successful sooner.

I’ve been mainly working in the “helped many brands be successful in an often intimidating medium” area of this, but I do occasionally make some fun videos. So, for the foreseeable future, I’ll be posting my video blog entries to Filmosity.tv. Enjoy!

Working with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, hawkwing, Inc., and Tunxis Community College, we spent a week breaking down racial, ethnic, and cultural barriers to help bring their stories to more people.

This is more than a documentary. It is a living, breathing, historical record of what was important to the Lakota people, as passed down through the generations.

Finally, after several years of use by the tribe, by hawkwing, and by many educational institutions, we present The Lakota Elders Project: The Journey of the Generations to the world.

For more information on hawkwing, Inc. and how you can help acheive their goals, follow the link to hawkwing.org.

Here’s what I am not: A marketer. A salesman. A guru. A ninja, samurai, gladiator or any other weapon wielding ancient warrior. A social media anything. An expert, an optimizer, or an evangelist.

I am a creator. I make things, whether with my hands, my eyes, or my mind. It’s a unique position in which I reside, being able to make something from nothing, to craft a story from seeming tedium, to whittle away shavings of wood to reveal a piece of artwork.

So many of us are in the same position, but we cover it up with titles that mean nothing but sound important or clever.

But…

You know what I love most about video and podcasting? Talking with people, recording what they have to say, and crafting it into a compelling story. It’s like magic to me.

My title is not important. The story I tell is.

But why do most productions shoot on a green background? What happened to blue screens? What’s the difference? Those were questions I once wondered myself, and the answers can be a little confusing.

Blue Screen of Dea….er…um…

When chroma key was first invented, engineers found that a specific color could be pulled out from the background of a shot and replaced with another. The engineers chose blue because they thought of it as a color that was the furthest away from natural skin tone, a factor that was very important in keeping the actor from disappearing in the chroma key process.

Back in the day (I’m talking early 1930s up until the late 80s here), filmmakers would use a pretty complicated and difficult technique called travelling matte (it’s still called that sometimes), whereby an actor was filmed in front of a blue screen, and then the color was removed in post-processing to reveal a transparent background. Then (in very simple terms) the film with the transparency could be put in front of a separate background—say a remote mountain pass—without the actor actually being on location. This process still holds true today, though we call it Chroma Key.

The Key to All

The word “key” in the term “chroma key” has a simple root. In the early days of chroma keying on film, fimmakers were essentially optically cutting a “keyhole” out of the background image (called the female matte), so that when we place a new image (footage shot in front of the blue screen) on top of the old image, the keyhole blocks out the area we don’t want to see. The pictures below illustrate how this works.

Green Acres

The color green was introduced into the equation—and became much more popular than blue—when digital compositing came onto the scene. Green is also one of the colors in the color spectrum that is far away from human skin tone. This again allows for a clean key to be pulled from the shot. Green works better in the digital realm because image sensors in today’s digital cameras are more sensitive to green, and the green channel (of Red, Green, Blue color channel fame) generally holds more image information than the other two. Red, of course, is way too close to human skin tone, so that is a bad choice for chroma keying.

While the process of chroma keying has changed over the years, and the prevailing color has shifted from blue to green, the essential principles—background, matte, keyed image, final composite—remain the same. So the why of green vs. blue comes down to a matter of bits and bytes.

*photos courtesy FABLibrary

1. Use a light meter. Making sure your subject has the same exposure reading as the green screen is important in getting a good, clean key to pull.
2. Eliminate all shadows. Shadows on the green screen are a hassle in post. Try to eliminate (or at least mitigate) as many as you can.
3. Use a large enough space to get separation. Related to #2, get your subject away from the backdrop so their shadow doesn’t fall on it.
4. Clean your lenses…all of them. Smudges, streaks, splotches, grime and dust all make for a really difficult chroma key. Clean all your lenses, filters, and–if you’re using a TelePrompTer–the two-way mirror.
5. Get the proper white balance. If green doesn’t look green when you shoot, it’s not going to look green in the edit suite either. Which means it’s going to be a pain to color correct then pull the key.
6. Ensure super sharp focus. If you’re using traditional video camera with a non-moving subject, do a deep focus and mark the spot on the floor and the camera. If you’re using a DSLR, use the camera’s digital zoom do focus. Zooming the lens on a DSLR will throw the image out of focus when you move it.
7. Use markers. If you have movement in your chroma key shot, you’re going to want to use tape markers to maintain focus and help editors in post. Markers on the floor for talent (and focus pullers/camera ops) allow you to know exactly where the focus point lies at a particular point in the movement. Markers on the background will help motion artists to track camera movement.
8. Record at the highest bitrate you can. While high bitrates aren’t necessarily going to make for an easier time keying, the better image quality can help pull a sharper key with more detail. You’ll also avoid the “jaggies” that result from high compression/low bitrate.
9. Watch your audio. With all this activity centered around making sure everything is perfect for the chroma key, it’s easy to forget about one of the most important parts of any motion picture production: the audio. Check your mics, make sure they’re working, and listen for ambient sound that might interfere with production.

Watch for an upcoming post about why most productions use green screens instead of blue, and when blue screens are appropriate.

Photo courtesy R. Dlugosz Photography

Last week at the Social Media Breakfast Maine, I was able to hit a milestone in Filmosity’s live web video streaming capabilities. For the first time, we were able to simultaneously stream live video to both the web and to mobile devices. Thanks to Livestream.com‘s Procaster app, I was able to broadcast multiple streams optimized for various devices, while seamlessly controlling the production through Livestream.com’s web studio. This is a great step forward for SMBME and for Filmosity, as it allows more people who are unable to attend the breakfast in person to benefit from the wealth of information presented there.

You may ask if the live web stream has adversely affected attendance numbers, and my answer is decidedly NO. In fact, I believe (though I have no proof…yet) that the live broadcast has brought more people to Portland, Maine to enjoy SMBME in person. Attendance numbers have risen so steeply in the last few months that SMBME organizers Amanda O’Brien and Kyle Pouliot of Hall Web Services have had to change venue capacities twice in the past year!

The Social Media Breakfast Maine live web video stream is a great example of the power of live web video and its influence on people. It’s one of the best ways for the SMBME organizers to spread the word about the event and its value. Imagine what a live web stream could do for your event!

Learn more about how Filmosity can help grow your event through Live Web Video Streaming. Contact us today.

* View past Social Media Breakfast Maine videos

Why: Capturing reality

There’s something to be said for raw. Raw is real, exciting, and immediate. Raw can convey a sense of urgency. But knowing when to use raw, and how to implement it, can be a daunting task, especially when context is not present. While this post is all about Raw video, it can be applied to just about any creative endeavor. In video, we see raw all the time: News footage from the battlefront or cell phone images from a natural disaster. Raw video has its uses, and it’s within those contexts that we see it most often. We can also see raw video in our own lives. Think of the difference between a professionally produced wedding video and the video shot by one of your groomsmen. Arguably, the video from the professional videographer looks better, aesthetically, but emotionally there may be a disconnect. The video from the groomsman will be shaky, dark, and noisy, but he’ll get things the pro video guy will never even think to get, or have access to. Raw is good.

When: Opening doors

Let’s face it, you’re not going to just use raw video all the time. You simply can’t tell a coherent story like that because you’ll be missing things like context and story. But you will use raw video for some things. For instance, I am a community blogger for WCSH Channel 6 in Portland, Maine. A few weeks ago, the fine news guys over at the station shot a promo with me, and we went out on location to shoot some interview footage. While we were shooting, I pulled out my mobile phone and starting shooting video of the news crew shooting video of me. It was raw footage that I simply uploaded to YouTube on the spot, and then later posted to the Around Town blog on the WCSH website. Raw was immediate, timely, and interesting. No context was really necessary. (I’m told that later this year, I’ll be able to post video directly to the blog via a smartphone app, making Raw even more immediate!)

How: Putting it to use

You most likely already have the tools to make raw work for you (if you don’t, there are inexpensive barriers to entry), no matter what medium you’re working in. Take some time to look at what you have and find a place to share it. Writers have text editor programs, the free Adobe PDF creator service, and hundreds of websites to host and share your work. Video creators have inexpensive pocket cameras, built-in editing software on their computers, and loads of video sharing websites. The important thing is that you create the content. Raw is useful for both business and entertainment, which means you can hit a wide range of audiences. The point is to just get out there and create your content, be consistent in how often you do it, and make it work for you.

I’m not going to advocate using raw, uncut, unedited anything for all situations. In fact, in some cases, raw can be detrimental to your cause. It’s at this point that you need to use your best judgment about whether it’s more important to get something up for people to see, or for there to be a coherent, logical, edited piece of work that really gets a specific message across.