Using a 50" Plasma TV as a green screen?
 

I've noticed that the topic of lighting a green screen has come up often on here. Is it possible that if you display a green on the plasma television, which has even lighting, and put your subjects in front of it, I could get a really clean key? Besides the fact that you wouldn't have much room to work with, does anybody think it would work? Has anyone tried it?

Instead of green, why not just show the actual background on the plasma screen? I did this for a little project using a model helicopter and it looked surprisingly good!

I actually did this with an Apple 23" Cinema display, I made a photoshop file up with R: 0 - G: 255 - B: 0 and zoomed in so it filled the screen.

It worked very well. :)

You'll be kinda limited to a head and shoulders shot - or if you turn it vertical - an upper torso shot with little arm movement capability...

So size is kinda an issue - particularly if you want some space between your subject and the screen to avoid spill. (A glowing array of light emitters will probably generate more spill than a typical subtractive lit surface - but that's probably not an serious problem.

And, of course you're using a multi-thousand dollar gizmo to do what you can do with a $50 roll of seamless and a few hundred dollars in lights...

But I can't see any reason it shouldn't work.

Let us know how it works out. I'd be interested.

Would a good quality video projector and screen be suitable for this sort of thing?

Yes but rear projection would probably be more suitable than front projection is my guess--less spill that way.

Once upon a time there was a backlit blue screen used for the movie "DragonSlayer". It was huge and they lit it from behind with blue colored fluorescent tubes. The ballasts were operated off of DC voltage to reduce the flicker (electronic ballasts either didn't exist in early 80's or were very uncommon). The resulting keys or mattes they got were really great looking.

wouldn't you get really bad glare from the glass screen? also this plasma screen may be too bright. you only want about 1 stop over what your subject is at.

hehehe my thoughts exactly..

Yes, i do this quite often with rear projection (i have a Panasonic AE700) and have the talent in front of the screen while the projector is behind it. The good thing is that you can find 2way screens which work a treat and u can always mess with the focus to fake a decent DoF

My LCD screen is glare free.

You can adjust the brightness on monitors and TVs.

I recently did some stills at a client's video shoot (hi def shoot for an infomercial). Half of the commercial had talent in front of a large plasma screen, since the client's big claim is using broadcast TV to sell houses. They just had a bright green frame on the screen, and back lit the talent warm to supress spill... and the talent was close, maybe 12-24" in front of the screen.

The keys looked good on DVD when they dropped the content onto the screen; I even pulled an easy key (from my Nikon D70 shots) in Photoshop for their brochure. So, in my experience, yes it works, but seems most useful for miniature work or for, say, computer screen readouts in a scene.

I have used a rear projection Mits TV with the "no input" blue screen on an intro.The screen is quite matte and not shiny at all.Just light the subject right.

Wow, guys, this is way overkill for very little benefit. It's not that hard to evenly light a BG the size of a 50" tv (even much larger) and really there is not much benefit. Either way you will be limited more by the format if shooting DV, the plasma won't help that at all.

As to projectors, one DP I know has had pretty good results using a small digital projector on a screen (not even rear projected) for doing faked-up car shots, they look quite good -- and much faster/easier than green screen.