Friday 25 September 2015

Why it is worth paying more for proper Green or Blue paint.

Why it is worth paying more for proper Green and Blue paint.

For years I listen to people debate about chromakey paint. There's the one side that swears all paint is created equal, and it's a waste of money buying something like Rosco professional chromakey paint. There are many people online who swear by Home Depot's Behr "Sparkling Apple" green paint. The thing is you can pay $50 for a can of paint from a home-improvement store or you can cough up $100 for a can of professional paint like Rosco's DigiComp green or blue. 
The differences $50! All this time and debate over a lousy 50 bucks. 
I Believe that the professional paint is better, and the video I linked into this blog post does a great job of explaining why it's better. 
Let me put it to you this way. Let's say I have a client that wants me to shoot a bunch of interviews on green screen. In the end I edit down all the footage to about three minutes of final footage that needs to be keyed out. Now I chose to paint my wall with the cheaper paint, and so I saved $50. Let's put that aside for a minute. 
Now let's assume I spend a couple of days comping all the talking head shots and putting in some corporate flying logo behind them. Let's assume for arguments sake that the cheaper paint gave me a little bit of a problem and I spent an extra four hours fiddling around trying to get a clean key. That $50 I put aside will not make up the difference in labor for those extra four hours. And this is just one job. I've painted the studio wall already and now every time a new job comes in I may have to account for a couple extra hours of work cleaning up my keys. It's ludicrous to me to try and save $50 upfront knowing that I may spend literally hundreds of hours over the next few years wasted on cleaning up crappy keys.
Why not just spend the extra 50 bucks upfront and get a cleaner shot every single time I have to pull a key from my green screen footage.
Anyway watch the video and you decide for yourself.
Robert Waterworth