Angus Farquhar, Online Video Producer

Green screen keying is harder than you think

When Which? was given and exclusive first look at the Samsung Galaxy Tab we all got very excited but to be honest the Samsung Euro QA lab isn’t the best looking location to film. Brainwave, greenscreen. Well that’s what I thought.

We already had a Reflecmedia Litering and reflective screen that I’d used for a few short videos but this was going to be a 20 minute behemoth and boy did it test my video editing hardware.

Now it wasn’t a complex edit but with two After Effects compositions doing the keying for the presenter and the cutaways Premier was really struggling.

Now I run a pretty serious 8 core HP workstation with CS5 taking full advantage of the Nvidia Cuda and Mercury playback engine but I was still reduced to playback at the rate of one frame every five seconds which made editing very difficult.

I’m happy with the result and it would have looked alot worse if we didn’t use the green screen but I may have to rethink my methods the next time we try something like this, or maybe just leave double the time I’d normally expect.