Light setup 5 or 4

[Jose Fonseca]

I don't own any light equipment besides two 13 watt fluorescents and a 500 watt work light. I have been trying to light a green screen with it and realized I need better light equipment. Currently I am doing test before I go into production in January. I don’t need a lot of green screen I plan to constrain the actor in front of it. I am currently using green party table cover that I bought from my local party store. This seems to be working great just don’t have the right lighting for it.

Green Screen setup Size 15 ft x 15 ft

So my question is how many lights would work for lighting the green screen and the subject?

Can I get away with using 2 lights for the green screen and 2 lights on the subject?

If so what is the best light kit I can buy that will be able to handle this situation?

I was looking at this kit I notice there are 2 versions 4 light and 5 light setup:

Lowel DV Creator 55 Kit

I am not trying to go over $1500.

Thanks in advance
--Jose

[John Marion]

Jose,

I love your style! I haven't tried a table cloth yet for a green screen, but it reminds me of some creative sound booth set-ups I've done to record some narration, but that's another story. And I've used work lights too. They have worked great for me with a black background.

I have a professional cloth green screen that I purchased for a very reasonable price a while back. I think I got it from eBay. You might want to check there, as the quality for the green screen might make a difference in getting the lighting right.

I've only played around a little with the green screen, as I wanted to have it for potential projects rather than needing it for a specific project when I made the purchase. At the time I did some research about lighting for the green screen, maybe you will find the following points helpful.

1. Light the green screen evenly. You might need 4 lights for this but I suppose two well positioned lights might work, depending upon distance issues.

2. Move the subject far enough from the green screen so that you don't get any green light spill reflecting on the edges of the subject. Otherwise it will be a fuzzy edge on the subject or worse.

3. Use three point lighting on the subject: key, fill, and back. Don't rely on the lights for your green screen to light your subject. The idea is to light the screen and the subject separately.

Your work lights will probably work fine for this. The issue is finding the space to create distance between the screen and your subject and to have large enough screen to fill the background at that distance. This is where you might find that your table cloth is not big enough. You did say the area for the screen is 15x15, is the table covering really that big?

[Jose Fonseca]

Hi John,

Thanks for you reply. Yeah some of the issue is exactly that right now. My space is to small to move the subject far away from it. So I do get spill. I figured if I can get it pretty close now with constrain space and minimal light equipment it should only get better when I am ready to shoot. Right now it takes about 6 keys in primate to key it out. Not the cleanest key but close.

No the table covering is not that big but I cut it and placed another strip next to it so it is almost that size. I only use a small section of it.


Right now I am doing research and finding what advantages I get if I by a tota over a v-light or vise-versa.

--jose

[Michael Salzlechner]

you can try to overcome the spill by backlighting the subject with the complementary color or at least backlighting the subject to kill the spill