It doesn’t matter if you’re shooting a commercial, a music video, an episodic television show, or a feature film - green screen shots have become an essential component for any production. Continue reading to learn how you can be a hero – both on-set and in post-production – when you light your green screen with the MIX technology found inside Rosco DMG Lighting fixtures and why they are excellent lights for lighting green screens.
All of our DMG Lighting fixtures are soft lights that produce an easy-to-blend light output. This makes it easy to create flat and even lighting for your green screen. For our “Green Screen Hero” setup, our crew used DMG MINI lights on the ground to illuminate their green screen.
These three fixtures were assigned as Green Screen lights using the fixture's SOURCE MATCH MODE. This setting is accessible via the fixture's controller or via our free myMIX app. The Green Screen option in SOURCE MATCH MODE provides a pure green light to bounce off of your green screen that will make it easier for compositing software to lock onto that hue when pulling a key. If you'd like to learn more, we explained the physics behind this lighting technique in a previous blog about using our CalColor Green gels on white light fixtures to achieve the same effect.
Using the MIX Green Screen Mode also enabled our crew to use less-lights! Lighting a green screen with white light needs a lot more illumination to get the proper amount of green energy back to the camera. If you hit the screen with just green light, however, you’ll find that you won’t need as much overall light output. This means you need fewer fixtures, which translates into fewer cable runs, less power, and faster setup times. In this shot, for example, our crew only used three DMG MINI lights to effectively light their green screen.
Another pair of DMG MINI lights were set to an ultra-warm 1700K in WHITE MODE – one on the ground and another a little higher on a C-stand. These two lights not only conveyed the glow from the “city lights below," they also helped to create separation on the talent from the green screen. The compact nature of the DMG fixtures enabled the crew to hide all of the units on the ground behind our small, rooftop scenic element.
Finally, our filmmakers needed to create a nighttime lighting effect in the foreground. They experimented with several different colors in GEL MODE, before deciding on Frosty Moonlight in SOURCE MATCH MODE. That cyan-tinted blue was assigned to a DMG SL1 to create faux moonlight on our gaffer-hero’s back as he looked out on the green screen/city he was there to light.
If you’d like to learn more about the DMG Lighting fixtures featured in this article, visit the DMG Lighting product page on the Rosco website. If you’d like to use DMG Lights on your next project, click the button below to find a rental shop near you.
Cinematographer: Andy Van den Eynde