This week I have to shoot some food for a local fast food chain. The shots are going to be in the style of "floating" food with the camera zooming through them (in the style of Taco Bell, Wendy's, & KFC.) When these people are shooting the food, do they use blue/greenscreen to achieve this? I have tried doing a black background with some success, but it's harder to set the foot up to shoot. Any tips for doing this?

thanks,

Matthew Rogers

Most of the "zoom through" shots I've ever seen were done with special periscope lenses. They consist of a series of lenses and mirrors that hang down from the camera and allow you to float the camera above the food on a jib arm or track system,

Like this Optex system...

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/attachment.phpattachmentid=2525&stc=1&d=1175494239

Maybe we don't totally understand what you want but I did something similar to what you are talking about for a video once. It's very simple to do and you don't need any kind of video camera at all. Are you talking about zooming past the food like it's coming from afar and then past one side of the camera or the other? If so, here's how I accomplished this effect.

I wanted some objects to zoom past the camera similar to like when the Enterprise zooms past the camera in the opening credits of the original series. I just took still digital photos of the objects against a green background and doctored out any support that might have been showing in the pictures by painting over it with the same shade of green. So now we have object surrounded by green space. Then in Vegas, I inserted the photos each on a different timeline with the chroma key plugins enabled for green and fine tuned. Finally, I used the keyframing pan and scan features of Vegas to move the pictures forward and to the side alternating left and right. I keyed in the appropriate background behind all this on another timeline and what you had was all these objects seemingly flying by themselves past the camera in front of some other background video (could be anything really including a still photo of space or whatever). You can control the speed of the flying really easily since Vegas keyframing is so easy to use.

The final object came directly at the camera as if it was going to bump into it and then I used a transition of a few frames of garbled, snowy video before going to the next scene.

So just substitute my objects for pictures of your plates of food in front of green screen...

Maybe we don't totally understand what you want but I did something similar to what you are talking about for a video once. It's very simple to do and you don't need any kind of video camera at all. Are you talking about zooming past the food like it's coming from afar and then past one side of the camera or the other? If so, here's how I accomplished this effect.


Hehe..evidently I was not clear enough (there goes my comm degree!) I know how to get the zooming past. I will do it with a combination of the linear slide I have for my camera and After Effects. What I am more worried about is keying out the background so I can pull it out. It's far easier to key people because they are not as close to the background. I am having more of a problem because I have to set the food closer and am getting shadows. As I said before, the black worked pretty well, but I am going to go get some bluescreen today to try it. Hopefully I can light it so I am not getting spill onto the food or food containers.

thanks,

Matthew

Hopefully I can light it so I am not getting spill onto the food or food containers.

I understand now. Well you might try an amber gel on the food to counteract any blue spill. You would use a magenta gel if you went with green screen. I'm still not totally clear on why black didn't work for you though.

I understand now. Well you might try an amber gel on the food to counteract any blue spill. You would use a magenta gel if you went with green screen. I'm still not totally clear on why black didn't work for you though.

So amber on the food, and then color correct the white back to true white? I wish I was doing this more like a shot with the item places in a basket/table/etc full of fresh food instead of the cutout. Oh well!

Thanks,

Matthew

Get the food further away from the screen. It doesn't have to sit on it!

Suspend the food from a C-stand on monofiliament fishing line. Make a mini-table, how small can you go, and paint it green. You will have to touch up the key, but if most of it is a good key that will reduce hand-work dramatically.

No question about it, if you can find a way to get the food away from the screen that's best. I think you were just taking the easy route by resting the food on the screen right?

No question about it, if you can find a way to get the food away from the screen that's best. I think you were just taking the easy route by resting the food on the screen right?

Yes, I'm having to do that to get some shots--though the food is in a cup (this is the product http://www.petros.com/) However, I will also be shooting some baked potato's and chili dogs. Those will not be showing the bottom I believe, so I should be okay for that.

Another question I have is my shutter speed... I am shooting HD 30P with it going to a 24P edit (looks wonderful with the slight slowdown.) However, I am getting a little motion blue and am wondering if a cleaner key wouldn't come better with a higher (aka sharper) shutter... I am pretty amazed how good my keys look even with shooting HDV (of course I am upconverting to Sheer 4:4:4 and Uncompressed 10 bit.)

Matthew

Not sure. I'm still not totally sure I understand your motion here and how your zooming is working. Your starting out far on the product and zooming into the middle of it?

I'm confused as well.

Shadows are the result of your lighting setup.

How are you lighting this?

With such a modest sized subject, you should be able to light the food any way you like and still pull a clean key.

Also, where is this going and how are you delivering it? Your workflow with all this pullup/pulldown reprocessing from HDV to uncompressed seems pretty complex if this is gonna get dumped to DV or even (shudder) legacy 3/4" for local cable.

Just idly curious.

I'm confused as well.

Shadows are the result of your lighting setup.

How are you lighting this?

With such a modest sized subject, you should be able to light the food any way you like and still pull a clean key.

Also, where is this going and how are you delivering it? Your workflow with all this pullup/pulldown reprocessing from HDV to uncompressed seems pretty complex if this is gonna get dumped to DV or even (shudder) legacy 3/4" for local cable.

Just idly curious.

Here is a mov file of what I shot today with the greenscreen. One problem I ran into was not having enough small lamps (being as I had 5 1k's and 2 200's) to get the proper balance. However, I think everything won't be too bad to key. Some manual rotoscoping will just have to happen no matter what. I have to remember that only when your doing basic people greenscreen will you not have to rotoscope.

file: http://www.macvilleproductions.com/petros/petrosh264.mov

The spots are going to the local NBC station for the 1982 world's fair anniversary show (plus running other slots through june.)

Thanks,

Matthew

Matthew,

So what kind of problem are you still running into?

To my eye, it looks like your shot is just fine and should key perfectly.

You might need a simple garbage matte to deal with the cast shadow underneath the container, but I can't see anything in this shot that would present a problem.

One suggestion though...

Rotate in the opposite direction so that the PRODUCT NAME moves right to left increasing readability.

(That's a good example of what I'm thinking of when I direct shots like this... sweating the technical stuff is well and goo, but the REAL quesion is always IS THE SPOT SELLING THE PRODUCT!. I can deal with an imperfect key a WHOLE lot easier than a client who says "Looks great, but I can't read the frekin' NAME OF THE PRODUCT!)

(grin)

For what it's worth.

Matthew,

So what kind of problem are you still running into?

To my eye, it looks like your shot is just fine and should key perfectly.

You might need a simple garbage matte to deal with the cast shadow underneath the container, but I can't see anything in this shot that would present a problem.

One suggestion though...

Rotate in the opposite direction so that the PRODUCT NAME moves right to left increasing readability.

(That's a good example of what I'm thinking of when I direct shots like this... sweating the technical stuff is well and goo, but the REAL quesion is always IS THE SPOT SELLING THE PRODUCT!. I can deal with an imperfect key a WHOLE lot easier than a client who says "Looks great, but I can't read the frekin' NAME OF THE PRODUCT!)

(grin)

For what it's worth.

No real problems. Would like to have the blue key below the produce a little better, but oh well. Yeah, we found out later that the motor would go both ways, but alas! It doesn't really matter because the the shots I will use probably won't won't show any of the logo on the cup. The tea we shot later looks REALLY sweet--it's amazing looking at the water droplets in HD!


Matthew

Looks good to me. I've done animated keyframing in vegas too when I needed a cookie cutter garbage matte to change shape during a video because of some movement.