While mixing your own greenscreen paint is often a popular choice with low-budget filmmakers, there are definite advantages to buying a specially created version. As we got prepped for doing the Depleted: Day 419 film, we needed a couple of greenscreen panels for some of the effects work. As such, we chose this time to test TubeTape’s ChromaKey Paint. (Industry leader Rosco with their Chromakey Paint served as our control comparison.)
In this review, we looked at the TubeTape Chromakey Green paint, although they make a blue, as well.
Testing out a TubeTape Greenscreen painted panel.
Ease of Use
Tubetape’s Chromakey paint is based on matte latex paint. As such, it does require a bit more care than Rosco’s vinyl acrylic paint. When I first opened up the can, I noticed that a lot of the paint had separated in storage, so it had to be mixed up pretty thoroughly to get a consistent color. (The kind folks at TubeTape sent us this test paint during the winter, but we had needed to wait until we were prepping for the upcoming Depleted short to test it due to the weather. As such, it’s possible that this wouldn’t the case if you were using it immediately after it was shipped.) Once we got the color correct, we painted the first coat on the portable panel we were using. It was a little splotchy on the first paint through, but, once it had dried and we applied the second coat, it was a good consistent color.
Even though it wasn’t as easy to use as the Rosco paint, it was substantially easier to clean up. It was a breeze to wash out the brushes and the rollers, whereas the thickness of the Rosco paint made the rollers difficult to clean and the brushes pretty much a lost cause.
The single pigment on the Rosco control panel (left) yields a consistent unaltered color.
The TubeTape mixture (right) yields a slight change from green to yellow-green..
Depth of Options
Unlike Rosco’s entry level paint, TubeTape has a number of cloth backdrops that seem to be the same color, so you should easily be able to combine painted pieces with cloth elements to help keep the green color consistent for more elaborate keying sequences. Hopefully TubeTape will consider creating some matching tape in the future, as that could give them a leg up in the low-budget filmmaking community. (Especially since industry leader Rosco currently only has matching cloth and tape for their premiere Digicomp line, which is their most expensive line.)
Performance
Once you put on the second coat, the chromakey paint is pretty consistent color. It does take longer to fully dry than the Rosco paint that served as our control and it is a little lighter in color with a bit more of a yellowish cast to it (due to the differences in color pigmentation in the paints). Fortunately, it’s not much lighter, as it can be easy to over-light greenscreen panels (which lowers their keying effectiveness and causes them to reflect more green light on your talent) so you always want them to be a bit on the dark side to prevent this, nor is the yellow cast noticeable enough to damage the key.
