Pro edition
Plate Checklist.
The demo publishes what a bad plate costs. This is the page that stops it happening — written to be read at speed by somebody who is already busy and does not work in post. Everything in the first table takes about 10 minutes in total, across a whole setup. That is the entire argument.
On the day
| Item | Time | How | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tracking markers | 2 min | Crosses of tape, 4–6 in frame, on flat areas that stay lit and never go behind the subject. | A solved track is the difference between a shot that takes an afternoon and one that takes three days. |
| Clean plate | 30 s | Roll thirty seconds of the empty frame, same lens, same exposure, before or after the take. | The only thing on any list that makes a shot CHEAPER. Removal work roughly halves. |
| Lens and camera data | 45 s | Focal length, T-stop, focus distance, height, tilt. Written down, once, per setup. | Free on the day. Reverse-engineering it from the image is most of a day per setup. |
| Greenscreen lighting | 5 min | Even to within a stop, lit separately from the subject, subject at least 2 m off it. | The single most common reason a key needs hand-drawn mattes. Five minutes of relight beats a week of roto. |
| A backlight on hair | 1 min | Any hard source behind the subject, off-axis. | Nothing in post recovers hair detail that was never separated from the background. |
| Reference ball and chart | 20 s | Grey ball, chrome ball, colour chart, held in the plate for one second at the head. | Lighting reference for anything CG. Twenty seconds, and it is the difference between matched and nearly matched. |
| A photo of the set | 30 s | Phone panorama from the camera position, plus one of the floor. | Costs nothing, answers a hundred questions in week three, and no one has ever regretted taking it. |
What to avoid, and what to do instead
- Handheld through a removal area Up to ×4 on the shot. This is the most expensive habit on any set.Instead
Lock it off, or add markers and accept that we will track it.
- Motion blur across the thing being removed ×2, and the result is never quite clean.Instead
A faster shutter for that take, or a second locked pass.
- Green bounce onto skin Spill suppression on skin is hand work and it always shows a little.Instead
Move the subject off the screen, or flag it.
- Reflective props against green A chrome kettle in front of a greenscreen is its own shot, priced as one.Instead
Dull it, angle it, or shoot it separately.
- Changing the lens mid-setup without saying A track solved against the wrong focal length fails subtly, which is worse than failing loudly.Instead
Say it. That is all.
5 decisions somebody has to make
-
01
Is this shot actually a VFX shot?
Roughly a fifth of the shots that arrive as VFX are better solved by moving the camera a metre or dressing the set. Ask before the day, not after.
-
02
Green, blue, or neither?
Blue for anything with warm skin and green foliage; green for most else; and neither for a subject that could simply be shot against the real background and rotoscoped. Neither is often correct.
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03
Where does the shot stop?
Agree the frame range before the take. "We will fix the whole thing" is not a spec and it is how a 40-frame job becomes a 400-frame one.
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04
Who owns continuity of the fix?
If a sign is removed in one shot it has to be removed in every shot of that street. This is discovered late roughly every time nobody names an owner.
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05
Is anybody from post coming to the recce?
One hour on a recce prevents more cost than any other hour in the schedule. It is also the first line cut from every budget.
6 things that go wrong without one
- No clean plate, so every removal is painted frame by frame instead of copied from a still.
- Handheld with no markers, and a three-day hand-track on a shot that was quoted as a day.
- Greenscreen lit as one unit with the subject, producing a hot spot and a shadow in the same frame.
- Lens data never recorded, so the CG element is matched by eye and never quite sits.
- A removal agreed for one shot and forgotten for the eleven others on the same street.
- The VFX supervisor cut from the recce to save a day rate, and the saving spent four times over in post.
Written for commercial and episodic work with a small VFX component. Feature and virtual production pipelines have their own capture requirements, several of which contradict items on this sheet — which is itself the argument for having somebody from post at the recce rather than a printed page.