Just saw some behind the scenes footage of how CGI is done in movies like planet of the apes (actors in spandex suits & other little technology on the suits— presumably to identify spots with joints/limbs?) and in this specific case, the actors were wearing deep blue spandex suits.
I imagine this particular color selection had to do with shooting the scene in a forest— green suits would be more difficult to distinguish against a background with green foliage— but are there any other variables that are considered? I was just wondering why they would choose blue over, say, hot pink— I imagine some of the plants might have blue undertones and I would think that hot pink would also stand out and make it easier to add CGI. Are there any colors that are off limits, or don’t do the job as well (obviously dark/non-neon colors would be difficult to work with, but what about highlighter yellow or tangerine, or bright magenta?)?
Additionally any fun facts/video resources about film production would be cool & much appreciated! I just learned about the “pink haze” in copies of sailor moon apparently resulting from the degradation of the cyan & yellow inks and I find that super interesting, so I’d love any filmmaking facts along those lines. Thanks in advance!
In: Technology
Green is usually the go-to because of three main reasons: 1 – it reflects the most light / is the easiest to light. 2 – it’s not near skintones in value/colour. 3 – most digital cinema cameras use a ‘bayer pattern’ sensor, which means that they have twice the detail when capturing green information than they do versus the red and blue primary colours. (this helps to pull a sharper ‘key’ to make the job of removing it easier)
We usually switch to blue when there is alot of green in the rest of the set. Red is avoided due to the fact that it’s close to skin tones. You _could_ use other colours, but generally it makes the key more muddy (cameras only have red, green, and blue photosensitive channels, so other colours will be a mix of those channels).
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