Pinnacle Studio 11 Deluxe comes with a green screen. You read that right. This moviemaking software program actually comes with a piece of St. Patrick’s Day-appropriate green cloth that measures roughly five feet by five feet. Ever wanted to put yourself inside a clip of your favorite movie? Ever wanted to be chased by your dog that has suddenly grown to monster-sized dimensions? Or maybe you just want to start filming your own news broadcast since, let’s face it, what passes for a news broadcast in America is a joke. If these or any other ideas for using a green screen to put yourself in places you could never actually be sound appealing then spend the next two to ten days doing nothing but writing for Associated Content and then take the $130 you will have earned and by yourself a ticket to your dreams of becoming the next great special effects filmmaker.
The green screen that comes with Pinnacle Studio 11 Deluxe works in association with the chrome key technology that arrives with the software. It is ridiculously easy to use, though a bit more difficult to perfect. In fact, I have yet to perfect it myself, though I have only attempted a few movies. Thus far I’ve had two kinds of trouble. One, I attempted to place my kids into the scene in The Phantom Menace where young Anakin first appears before the Jedi council. The problem was one I should have foreseen, however, and easily fixed. The Star Wars scene was in letterbox and my green screen overlay was not. As a result, the new scene did offer the illusion that my newly filmed scene was taking place in George Lucas’ ten year old movie. The problem was that the edges of the scenes filmed with Pinnacle’s green screen cloth were centrally located within the larger panorama of the Jedi council scene. The effect is jarring, giving the sensation of my children suddenly entering from another dimension. (Not so bad in a Star Wars movie, but trying to enter your kids into a scene from Because of Winn-Dixie in this way may not be so great.) That kind of problem is easy to fix by making sure the clip you use is full screen rather than letterbox.
The second problem I’m having with the green screen effect is taking more time to figure out. Just as in the use of a green screen on your local newscast or a low budget movie, there is often the problem of overpixellation. In other words you can tell it’s a green screen effect. Pinnacle Studio 11 software allows you to fine tune the image to make up for this problem, but it’s not as easy as judge getting your green screen to work. What is cool, however, is that you can fine tune how sharply defined your special effect is; in other words you can even make the image you shot in front of your green screen appear semi-invisible or even slowly disappear as if they were being “beamed” off the Starship Enterprise. There is a definite learning curve to using the chromakey effect on Pinnacle Studio 11 Ultimate, but when you consider all the other amazing effects and abilities that come with this program, you will consider it money and time well spent.
