Training
Review: Visual Effects for Directors, Pg. 2
And, even though this series encourages you to shoot on the highest-color representation camera you can for greenscreen work, they give most of their examples and advice out of the realm of micro-budget creation. They even go so far as to show you a comparison of professional paints and hardware store paints, explaining how hardware store paints can actually prove to be superior when lighting a cyclorama. In the end, they demonstrated this by building and painting an entire cyclorama (with lights) for about $700 (as opposed to the $5K - $10K greenscreen cycs can often cost to set up).
With all of this said, you do need to understand that the focus of this series is from the Production end of things. While they cover a decent amount of post-production, they do so with the intent of showing you what is and is not possible based on the shots you acquire in production. As such, this isn't a how-to video on using match-moving software or creating 3D environments in Maya.
Jealous of Justin Lin's creative greenscreen use in F&F3: Tokyo Drifit? Per and the team will show you how to do virtually the same thing, so that you have the capability of creating driving, flying, or almost any other sort of vehicle integration.
Interest Level
When HCW came out with their first set of training, it got dinged a little bit because, quite frankly, watching 3D people re-enact a myriad of camera shots can get a little tiring. (In their defense, I think it would be impossible to make a cinematography training course that stayed so riveting that you could sit through 6 DVDs worth of it in one go.)
Per and the folks at HCW have certainly improved on their last training style in this new series, choosing to use actresses to enact almost all of the effects and tricks they show and resorting to 3D characters only when necessary. Combine this with real-time demonstrations of techniques and post-production fixes and you have a DVD series that's so enthralling that you can literally sit down and watch a DVD straight through, much like you might watch the extra features from Lord of the Rings or a couple episodes of Mythbusters. Of course, with seven DVDs, you won't be able to sit down and watch them all back to back, but the fact that they're interesting enough to make you want to is a huge statement.
While its primary focus is on production, all elements of the pipeline are covered so you can see why it's important to control light on the greenscreen set. Sometimes this includes specifically casting shadows on your greenscreen so your actor or actress can walk through them in the artificial world..
Reusability
Although this series is easy to understand and terribly interesting, there's no way you'll be able to remember everything after a single watching. As such, the series is easily broken up into chapters that you can come back to right before you start production on a shot that uses one of the series' principles. This makes reusability a cinch and ensures that this will be a DVD set that you'll want to have handy right beside your editing suite.
