Be The Hero In Your Next Green Screen Shoot – Light It With MIX®!

It doesn’t matter if you’re shooting a commercial, a music video, an episodic television show or a feature film - green screen shots have become an essential component to any production. Continue reading to learn why our DMG Lumière MIX LED fixtures are an excellent green screen light, and how you can be a hero – both on-set and in post-production – when you light your green screen with MIX.

All of our DMG Lumière LED fixtures are soft lights that produce an easy-to-blend light output. This makes it easy to create flat and even lighting for your green screen. For our “Green Screen Hero” setup, our crew used MINI MIX lights on the ground to illuminate their green screen.

These three fixtures were assigned as Green Screen lights using the fixture's SOURCE MATCH MODE. This setting is accessible via the fixture's controller or via our free myMIX app. The Green Screen option in SOURCE MATCH MODE provides a pure green light to bounce off of your green screen that will make it easier for compositing software to lock onto that hue when pulling a key. If you'd like to learn more, we explained the physics behind this lighting technique in a previous blog about using our CalColor Green gels on white light fixtures to achieve the same effect.

Using the MIX Green Screen Mode also enabled our crew to use less-lights! Lighting a green screen with white light needs a lot more illumination to get the proper amount of green energy back to the camera. If you hit the screen with just green light, however, you’ll find that you won’t need as much overall light output. This means you need less fixtures, which translates into less cable runs, less power and faster setup times. In this shot, for example, our crew only used three MINI MIX lights to effectively light their green screen.

Another pair of MINI MIX lights were set to an ultra-warm 1700K in WHITE MODE – one on the ground and another a little higher on a C-stand. These two lights not only conveyed the glow from the “city lights below," they also helped to create separation on the talent from the green screen. The compact nature of the MIX fixtures enabled the crew to hide all of the units on the ground behind our small, rooftop scenic element.

Finally, our filmmakers needed to create a nighttime lighting effect in the foreground. They experimented with several different colors in GEL MODE, before deciding on Frosty Moonlight in SOURCE MATCH MODE. That cyan-tinted-blue was assigned to an SL1 MIX to create faux moonlight on our gaffer-hero’s back as he looked out on the green screen/city he was there to light.

If you’d like to learn more about the MIX LED fixtures featured in this article, visit the DMG Lumière by Rosco webpage. If you’d like to use a MIX on your next project, click the button below to find a rental shop near you.

Cinematographer: Andy Van den Eynde 

About Joel Svendsen

Marketing Director: Joel's Rosco career began in Rosco's Hollywood office in 1999 – first in sales covering the Western US and the Los Angeles Film & Television market, and then as Product Manager for Rosco's Film & Television Products. Joel's knowledge about Rosco's products and how they're used in each of our different marketplaces makes him well suited for bringing the stories in Spectrum to life.