Best green screen material? Muslin/polyester

[lenny87]

Hello There,

i was wondering if there is somebody who has experience with both muslin and polyester green screen materials?

-Is there any disadvantage of using Polyester green screen?

-Is there any disadvantage of using cotton/muslin green screen material?

 

I am thinking of buying Trevira cs:

https://www.gerriets.com/en/television-cs-chromakey-fabrics

 

Thanx in front

greetz lenny

[BTM_Pix]

I know that we like to go for low cost solutions but in this case, because easy reliable chroma key is going to be so vital to what you are doing, I'm going to recommend you have a look at the Reflec system.

It has been around for years (it was originally a BBC development) and has also been ridiculously overpriced for years but at the end of the day it does produce good, easy, reliable keying without you having to do anything elaborate lighting or setup wise, which is vital if you are working on your own or with a small team. You can set this up in a few minutes and if you had to then go somewhere else and set it up again and get exactly the same results. 

Basically, it is a piece of reflective material which fires the light from an LED ring that you mount around the lens straight back to the camera which gives you a pretty perfect key without having to worry about lighting the background and the bi-LED versions of the ring mean you can switch from green to blue background instantly. 

It is not absolutely perfect but it is a very easy solution to work with and it means the time and expense of lighting the backdrop can be better spent lighting you.

There are a bunch of different versions of it to suit cameras from palmcorders up to broadcast ones and a lot of different sizes of the background material (including a pop-up round version like a reflector) but something like the Deskshoot Lite kit would be fine with a Panasonic GH camera.

If you hunt around on eBay you can find kits for around £800 and even less. There are also a few knock off versions kicking around as the fabric itself is based on (for which you could read possibly identical) to one made by 3M for safety clothing.

As I say, its not cheap but as what you are doing is solely based on chroma key then it might actually be worth putting money into this rather than say going big on a lens as for your application, my view at least, would be that your audience would spot the deficiencies in the keying long before the lens.