Green Screen Magic Made In Hollywood with Virtualsets.com and TriCaster

Green Screen Magic Made In Hollywood with Virtualsets.com and TriCaster posted: 22/02/2019

by Frank Wells

Bringing the magic of Hollywood to the small screen is a specialty of the award-winning, Emmy-nominated production and distribution house, Connection III Entertainment Corp. We have a full-fledged digital studio on par with our competitors with billion-dollar parents, says Cleveland O'Neal III, founder, President and CEO of Connection III. The beauty of green screen today is, if done correctly, it can be truly indistinguishable from a practical set.

Essential to creating that illusion are state-of-the-art virtual sets from Virtualsets.com used in conjunction with the NewTek TriCaster 8000 anchoring Connection III's control room signal flow, tools that Josh Neufeld, producer, editor and director for Connection III, says, unlock a whole lot of production value.

We love to make it seem like we have this huge studio and really we just have this one room with a green screen, Neufeld shares.

The twenty-plus-year-old Connection III's portfolio includes family-friendly, multicultural original television programming and motion pictures. Currently, the company produces and distributes four nationally-syndicated, weekly, half-hour television series. For over a decade, the Made In Hollywood TV series has brought its viewers the stars, directors and producers of each weekend's new box office movie releases through celebrity interviews, on-set and on-location coverage and a VIP perspective of red carpet premieres. As with Made In Hollywood's emphasis on film-making as opposed to celebrity-centric coverage, Made In Hollywood: Teen Edition is an educational and informational companion spin-off that focuses on the creative, technical and artistic skills of feature-film production, including insight into industry careers.

Made in Hollywood Now is the newest series on Connection III's roster, covering new content for all screens - Blu-ray, streaming, video-on-demand - as well as early peeks of future releases. The company's fourth production in current distribution is Live Life and Win!, offering teen success stories to inspire young viewers. Connection III programming is available in over 90% of U.S. television homes through national syndication to stations including CBS and Fox O&O's, among many other major affiliate stations, along with international distribution.

Connection III producer/editor/director Josh Neufeld at the NewTek TriCaster 8000 in the company's video control room during production.

Keeping Connection III busy are 48 annual episodes each of Made In Hollywood and Made In Hollywood Now, and 22 episodes each of Made In Hollywood: Teen Edition and Live Life and Win!. For all the programs, field reporters and crew capture location interviews and other video material. In the studio, hosts work in front of the green screen. The virtual sets include virtual monitors for display of graphics and movie clips.

When we're shooting, says Neufeld, I'm sitting in the booth at the TriCaster and controlling what's going on in those screens, switching when it needs to be switched so that whatever the hosts are talking about, what's going on behind them corresponds with what they're saying.

On recommendation from Connection III's technology consultant and installation firm, KeyCode Media, and following an evaluation in KeyCode's space, the Connection III studio was built with the TriCaster in mind.

Hosts Kylie Erica Mar and Patrick Stinson on the Connection III set during Made In Hollywood production. The confidence monitor shows the hosts composited on to one the virtual sets designed for Connection III by Virtualsets.com.

With the TriCaster and the use of virtual sets, Neufeld reveals, We don't actually have to ever move the camera. We just put the hosts on a different set. We have just one camera and we take it and we movie-magic it, make it to look like we have several cameras. We have a number of different virtual sets that we use throughout the shows. Sometimes hosts are both on one side of the [virtual] monitor or sometimes they're on either side of a monitor, so we do have a person who adjusts the camera [panning and zoom] and also runs the teleprompter on the camera.

We bought the TriCaster mainly for the virtual set capability; we've always used virtual sets, Neufeld continues. At the beginning, we used some of the built-in stock virtual sets that come with the TriCaster, but, we got out of that pretty quickly just because we wanted something unique, not something that everyone with a TriCaster has.

Tim Hedegaard is president of Virtualsets.com, specialists in providing realistic virtual sets since forming in 1997. With virtual sets, says Hedegaard, A lot of times people look at a production and think, Hmm, something is just not right.' They can't tell you what they could do to fix it, but they just know something isn't right. Our goal is to make virtual sets that really do look realistic, where the normal viewer doesn't realize they're watching a virtual set. In fact, they don't even pay attention to it. It's not even something that's even computing in their mind.

As its clients have implemented its designs, Virtualsets.com has worked with them to refine and optimize performance, developing expertise in how various systems operate. The biggest part of it is having a greater understanding of what the technology can do and can't do, says Hedegaard. We generally design all of our sets to be platform independent and that allows us to use them for multiple different systems. We try to have a really strong understanding of those systems and not just go off of the marketing brochure from any manufacturer.

In the case of the TriCaster, for

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