Tutorial: How to Design a Greenscreen Environment for Office Shoots

HD Camera Setup for Office and Studio Shoots

My go-to camera for office shoots like this one is the Canon XH A1 (Figure 5, below), which is now 6 years old but produces exceptionally crisp images and offers fine manual controls with three rings around the lens which I absolutely love (iris, focus, zoom).

Figure 5. The oldie-but-goodie Canon XH A1

The most important feature in this instance, however, is the one relating to the cable poking out the back, which is the FireWire cable that lets me connect to my computer and use Adobe OnLocation for the waveform and as a DVR. Getting proper exposure is always hard, but when you're shooting yourself, it's nearly impossible without a software waveform.

In the screen in the image below (Figure 6) you can see the zebra stripes on the left (you get two sets of zebras) plus the waveform on the upper right right. I confess that I don't use the Vectorscope on the bottom right beyond making sure that skin tones fall on or near the appropriate line at the 11:00 position.

Figure 6. Monitoring the shoot live in Adobe OnLocation

Working With a Teleprompter

I can wing my screencams pretty well without a script (and with lots of editing in post), but when I'm on camera for intros like these, I need a prompter. What you see below is my ProPrompter HDi Pro2 Teleprompter Kit for iPad, which cost around $800 when I reviewed it back in May 2010. The short story is that it uses your iPad as the computer that drives the system, you can see it poking out of the device in Figure 7 (below).

Figure 7. The ProPrompter HDi Pro2 Teleprompter Kit for iPad

You upload your scripts to your iPad over the Internet and you can control scrolling speed with another iDevice, like an iPod touch or iPhone. Works great, and is much cheaper than any other teleprompter system that I've seen, assuming that you own the iPad of course.

Capturing Audio

For audio, I used the Azden 330ULT 2-Channel UHF Wireless Microphone System Figure 8 (below). I love the battery-powered operation, the on-camera placement for the receiver and the quality of the UHF system.

Figure 8. The Azden 330ULT 2-Channel UHF Wireless Mic System

Obviously, the Canon has XLR connectors that can accept the incoming feed from the Azden, so no converter box was required.

Getting Good Exposure

Overall, the gear took about an hour to set up, then it was time to configure and adjust. Getting good exposure took the longest, as it always does. Audio was pretty simple to connect and test, and it took about 30 minutes to get the prompter up and running. Then it took about eight takes until I got what I considered a keeper, then breakdown and cleanup. Like I said, about three hours soup-to-nuts.

Here's the video. I'm not quitting my compressionist day job, and I'll do better next time, but I think it looks credible from a lighting and audio standpoint, particularly the background, which keyed out wonderfully in Premiere Pro using the fabulous Ultra Key. I know I need to do something about the dark spots under my chin (reflector maybe?), and make sure that any green tint in my face is gone after compositing, but it's not bad for a one-person shoot. And the hair does have a Max Headroom feel, but cripes, no one is perfect.

All navel-gazing aside, if you're a marketing or compression pro and have wondered why it took so long to shoot a simple 30 second video, well, now you know. And if you're on the production side and have clients who wonder the same, just send them this way.