Autodesk 64006-051108-9001 User Guide - Page 22

14 Chapter 2: Capture Keep Detail to a Minimum Keeping the detail within the scene to a minimum helps the individual frames of video compress more easily, giving you better results than video with lots of detail. It also makes the video easier to see when the movie is reduced in size for desktop delivery. If you are shooting an interview, keep the background simple - plain backdrops are often a good choice. If you have the experience and equipment, bluescreen or greenscreen can work very well for interviews. It is fairly common to film people indoors in front of windows. If there is a lot of detail or movement outside, you can throw the background significantly out of focus, which makes the file easier to encode. Trees are often used as backdrops for interviews filmed outside. The excessive detail of the leaves poses a challenge for encoding and should be avoided if possible. If you must film against a background that uses trees, use a shallow depth of field to blur the leaves and improve the final movie. Beware of trees moving in a breeze - the high detail and subtle changes between frames make both temporal and spatial compression very difficult. Ask the subjects to wear clothes that do not have high-contrast patterns or lots of detail. Plain colors are best - bold stripes or checked patterns can do very odd things when resized and encoded. Proper Lighting Generally speaking, video that is well lit encodes better than under- or over-exposed material. Most codecs work best with moderate-contrast material, and many codecs do not work well with dark scenes. Adequate lighting is critical to producing superior streaming movies because low-light conditions also produce excessively noisy video signals that lack details in the shadows. Overexposure is usually less of a problem but should also be avoided. You should not shoot video that you know is incorrectly exposed and plan to fix it in postprocessing. Missing detail and excessive noise can never be fully corrected after the fact. Properly lighting the scene is the only way to ensure the highest-quality results. Blue Screen and Green Screen Properly executed blue screen or green screen can significantly improve the quality of streaming movies. For example, if you use a bluescreen to composite an actor in front of a digital still, make sure the background image is perfectly steady and noise-free. The lack of video noise and movement in the background improves both temporal and spatial compression of the movie, which produces higher-quality results.