Blender green screening, VSE – and how to make your own greenscreen!

I am endeavoring to learn some of Blender’s (blender.org) VSE (Video Sequence Editor) and node compositing editor.

With the VSE you can arrange video clips and do effects, such as achieving a fade out to black (using three strips – video, gamma cross and color generator.)

Using VSE as a simple video editor may be very useful, and as it develops hopefully it will overrun such commercial monster products as Adobe Premiere Pro.  One advantage over Premiere Pro 1.0 that I have found is that Blender’s VSE accepts an .avi compression that I use, whereas Premiere Pro 1.0 doesn’t.  Besides that, Blender is completely free and open source, and is an alternative to Windows Movie Maker.  WMM can be very useful for shrinking file sizes and doing some simple editing (and you can do text effects and transitions,) but Blender’s VSE seems less dumbing.

And now about the greenscreening:

With the node compositing I am endeavoring to make a successful chroma keying – taking out a certain color, like bluescreening, also known as split screen – but it is proving quite a bit harder than I hoped. It seems (as is perfectly logical) that to have an effective keying I need very clear, pure colors to key out. Otherwise you get grays when it looks blue and your footage becomes very spotty.

Hopefully I will get some good results soon. Here’s a screenshot of my first work with chroma keying – overlaying a video on an image – not so great, but I’m learning.

Old machinery (video) on old machinery (image)

Also, doing further testing this evening, this chroma keying business may be much more difficult than I had hoped. Looking online for professional options, I found these two sites: (the first site recommended the second site.)

DIY (Do It Yourself – Bluescreens, Greenscreens, Backdrops and Background stands) Highly recommended to check out – you can find out about how to make your own greenscreen the cheap way. (not fool proof.

EEFX (green/blue screen backgrounds and backdrops(?)) Great for seeing professional quality equipement, seeing the prices, and learning about what makes their cloth special.

Hope you enjoy – looking forward to filming soon! Praise God!

-B

Kenneth Anderson does Storyboards for upcoming film “Easy Street”

Kenneth Anderson (or Kenny) is my cousin. He has served in the marines, gone to Iraq twice, and enjoys filmmaking. He is currently attending the New School in New York City.

Recently I had a chance to talk to him about filmmaking in general: what camera to buy, different filmmakers who became successful with very small resources, etc. One of the best pieces of advice I got was to just make films – to have fun making films.

Currently he is working with director Vlad Nikolic (director of “Love” and professor at the New School) as a storyboard artist for the upcoming film “Easy Street”. The film is based on a true story and follows the life of a drug dealer. It will probably be rated R, due to heavy language and probably other things.  The film has an unusual aspect ratio of something like 3.1 – but I shouldn’t tell too much about the film.  And don’t worry, I don’t know a whole lot more!

Here is a picture I shot of Kenny with some of his storyboards for Easy Street.

It is a privilege (and just plain awesome) to see the workings behind a film.

Until later! Thanks for reading and God bless,

Praise God!

-Banor