Blue screen background for video replacement

[Keith B]

Those are more for still photography than video. You can buy professional lighting, but since I know you like to tinker, check this out for a start http://www.videomaker.com/article/12095/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; Others may have more suggestions.

[Kalrog]

Charles - the big point of the umbrellas is to make the light source "bigger". Well, you have a HUGE light source if you need it - just take your high power work lights. Point them up or backwards and reflect them off of the wall or ceiling. Bingo - great light.

Other good places to get this stuff - eBay (seriously cheap backdrops - especially the Chroma Key ones) and B&H Photo Video. Adorama (already listed) and B&H are the top 2 online photo retailers out there - don't worry about your purchase at all.

Oh, and I'm starting a photography business. I have gotten educated on this stuff quite a bit in the past 6 months.

[CajunMan]

I know this is an old forum, but I just found it so what the hey.

I did this; http://www.pumptex.com/ a long time ago with a $100 digital camera, $20 worth of green cloth bought at wal-mart, a few cheap shop lights, and the free open source program called Gimp http://www.gimp.org/ It took me a few days to extract the frames, remove the green, then reassmeble the video, but it was cheap and fun to do.

[KD5NRH]

Charles - the big point of the umbrellas is to make the light source "bigger". Well, you have a HUGE light source if you need it - just take your high power work lights. Point them up or backwards and reflect them off of the wall or ceiling. Bingo - great light.

I missed this before, but 100W Daylight compact fluorescents are your friends. Make sure they're the Daylight ones, especially if you're ever planning to use them for stills where you might be supplementing with flash, and put several of them in the clamp-type shop light fixtures. You'll get a lot of light with not much heat, and the price for even a dozen of these is still well under pro lighting rigs. Since they're around 26W usage, four of them will draw barely more current than a single 100W incandescent. If you can run a 1000W worklight on a circuit, you could (theoretically) run 38 of the 100W equivalent CFs on it and still be safe.

The main reason for being picky about the light color temperature is that "soft white" may or may not be consistent between brands. IME, daylight or 5000-6500k bulbs are a lot easier to account for with white balance, and it doesn't cost that much to make sure that everything in your studio area is one brand of CF.

[Kalrog]

I missed this before, but 100W Daylight compact fluorescents are your friends.

The "Daylight" CF bulbs are nice - but you can also just set the WB on your camera to compensate for it. It is cheaper and easier to get started without the bulbs, but they aren't all that expensive either.