Go Green

Why using green works better for DV

by Stephen Schleicher
P a g e 1 o f 1

At least once a week in one of the many user groups out there, someone inevitably asks,
What is the best background for my chroma key shoot blue or green? If you are
shooting on DV, then I say go green, youll have better luck.

Way back in the day, television cameras used tubes to capture an image. Nearly all color
cameras were made up of three tubes, each representing one of the three color channels
(red, blue, and green). Actually, way back in the day is a bit misleading - as a student of
the 80s our stations TV cameras still used tubes with all the fun and joy that came along
with them. [an error occurred while processing this directive]By turning off one of the color
channels, the camera could be made virtually blind and unable to see that particular color
like blue, for example. This created a hole or empty space that allowed the Engineer or
Technical Director to fill that blank area with other information (weather graphic, video
channel, etc.). Today we call this transparent area the alpha channel.

Obviously making the camera blind to everything that had blue would cause all sorts of
problems; anyone wearing blue (or green) clothes would key out, and the viewer at home
would see floating heads on the screen not so good. To solve this problem, engineers
decided to set the key color at a one hundred percent pure hue of that color. This resulted
in chroma key blue and chroma key green paints that were used to color sets that would
later be keyed out.

For what seemed like a very long time, keying through a switcher or isolated keying
system (Ultimatte for example) was the only way to pull off a successful key in video.
Today, with digital technology, the process is much easier, and you dont even have to use
chroma key blue or green paint, as any solid color will work. You can pull a key from the
color purple just as easily as you could pull a matte from chroma key blue or chroma key
green screens.

So why do the people still use chroma key green and chroma key blue paint for the
background? Chroma key green and chroma key blue are colors that will more than likely
not show up on your foreground subject. Blue was selected because we do not have a lot
of blue in our complexions. Green was used as an alternative because many people wore
blue suits, jeans, etc. Because the chroma key colors are so brilliant and pure, they also
help contrast the foreground subject with the background. This makes it easier for you to
eyeball a key and spot problems during post.

The other reason why chroma key green and chroma key blue paint is still used
extensively is because the collective we still base our video signal on the original RGB
components. If you were keying out the color purple you would be delving into the red and
blue channels instead of just a single color channel. This could cause problems with other
colors in your image and should be avoided.

I mentioned RGB color space a moment ago, but there is a video space that is used quite
a bit and actually stemmed from the early days of color television when color video had to
be backward compatible with the black and white signal.

YUV is the result of this 1950s compatibility mandate and is still used to describe video
space today (you will see why this is important in a moment). YUV is a signal that contains
Luminance information (Y), and two channels of chrominance (color) information (U and
V). The Luminance channel is made up of the brightness - or intensity - values from the
RGB signal (represented in grayscale), and the U and V channels contain actual color
information for the Red and Blue channels (U=Red-Luminance, V=Blue-Luminance).
Green channel information is contained in the Luminance signal only.

Because the raw RGB video signal is bandwidth intensive, YUV is preferred because it
uses less bandwidth and thus saves precious space by not sending or transmitting the
luminance signal three times.

Of the three channels, Luminance is the least compressed (the Chroma channels are
always subsampled at either the 4:2:2, 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 compression schemes depending on
the format being used). Since the color green is derived from the Luminance channel and
makes up nearly 60% of the video signal, it tends to key best.

Want to see this for yourself? Open Adobe Photoshop or other paint program. Create a
new canvas and divide the area up into three areas. Fill each of these sections with 100%
of Red, Blue, and Green.



To simulate the Luminance channel, change this color image to greyscale.



As you can be seen, the Green channel is brighter than the other two. Blue at 100%
luminance contains approximately 1/6th the luminance of Green. This is not only a
technical consideration, but our mind also perceives the color blue as being darker than
the other two color channels.

While there are other considerations to take into account when shooting chroma key
footage (foreground subject, video format compression scheme, lighting, etc.), by
understanding how your video information is being processed, and where most of the
information is contained, you will be on your way to having a great key, and using the color
green is a good place to start.