Well, well, well. Look who's come crawling back for another episode.
It's the people who love me: the artist, formerly known as Captain Disillusion, heretofore to be referred to as
The Big 'D'
That's right. That's called a jump cut! Oof! Hat hair...
After my recent publicity stint, and views bump,
It's become clear that I got to get a little more professional about this whole YouTube thing...
You know talk a little bit faster, cut a little bit sooner...
I'm talking daily videos, broader topics, and above all,
fan engagement...
So what do you guys got for me?
'Hey Captain, I recently saw this video online, and being naturally skeptical, thought you might find it interesting.'
What the hell is wrong with you... Kyle?
'When I was like 15 years old, I fell in love with the skeptic...'
whoah
Oh, '...Mindset.'
Come on give me something to work with. Oh, here's one. There's not even the message.
It's just a video. Like, 'do this one debunk boy.' Okay, I would--
*sigh* Geez...
Are we really-- Is this really what's gonna happen, is this what we're doing?
I'm gonna have to--okay, Let's, Let's do it. That's fine.
[Sarcasm] Well look at the crazy Chinese man with the blanket of invisibility.
How could this possibly be possible?-- Oh wait. There's a disclaimer right there 'not real.'
[Sarcasm] I'm so glad you told me that, because I was about to... call the CIA.
Tim, what do you want me to say about this?
That we all, all of us, in the entire world, know that this is a green screen?
Like he's holding a green cloth, and then it's keyed out with the empty background
from the beginning? Except of course,
It's probably not green... cloth because everything else around him is green?
This is probably blue? Blue screen, like we've been using for a million years?
Which is another thing, people always on my case about why do they use blue.
Which I don't know why you even care about little historical details like that.
I mean yeah, when I was a s-small-- [Glitch sounds]
[Imitation] When I was a small boy, motion pictures were shot on film.
Which was covered with a compound called
Silver Halide (AgX).
These silver halide particles were extremely photosensitive,
and when exposed to light by the camera, they would burn. Like witches.
Then the unexposed particles would be washed away through a chemical process,
leaving behind a negative image.
And this is how it worked in black and white
The Technicolor version of this would employ three strips of film,
each sensitive to one part of the spectrum,
red, green, or blue,
and then combine them together for a full-color picture.
[Music from clip] But the filmmakers realized they could use the blue strip for the blue screen process because
not only is it farthest from human flesh tones,
be they a Black Panther or White Asian Lady.
But the blue strip also happened to have the finest grain.
Which in today's terms we might think of as resolution.
Of course all this was a rather primitive approach which did not look very good.
Later a brilliant man called Petrov Vlahos
was pressured by Hollywood studios to develop a better method.
There's a famous story about Mr. Vlahos
sitting on the toilet, pondering this technical challenge,
And as a piece of waste fell into the water beneath him,
he exclaimed, 'I shall make it more complex!'
[Imitation of Brady Haran] Wow! Is that really true, professor?
Well that is the story,
But--but--but
[Immitation] But then humanity said, 'hey, polluting our planet with tons of plastic and chemicals
seems lame and expensive.'
How about instead we make movies using--
[Autotune] digital technology!
A few guys were like, 'no way Jose!'
'I love the crappy look of film, and I'm going to keep using it. Also,'
[Autotune] 'vinyl records sound better.'
The rest of the world said, 'Okay, you do you, grandpas.'
We're gonna stick silicon chips in our cameras that have microscopic photo sensors
and make the Eastman Kodak company file for
[Autotune] bankruptcy.
This was called the digital cinema revolution.
A change so monumental, we're still
[Autotune] experiencing its After Effects (CC 2018).
[Glitch sounds] Whoa--
What just happened there?
It got a little too... Educational.
I'm an entertainment channel, I shoot my vlog on an Apple watch!
I do the chroma key by pressing a button in my app labelled, 'Background Boo!'
So don't come to me with wack questions like, 'how come in the digital age,
we now mostly use green screen instead of blue?'
[Chuckling] T-to understand that you would--
[Glitch sounds] Fir--fir--
first need to ask yourself a simple question.
Whom is this technology for?
And the answer almost always is: apes.
Descendants of apes whose retinas evolved much more sensitivity to luminance than to color.
Being able to detect a lion leaping at your face
takes precedence over being able to admire its majestic mane.
A nd what little color sensitivity our retinas have
is extremely biased toward green.
Probably because of all the green.
So when devising a way to distribute red, green, and blue
wavelengths of light onto a limited number of elements on a photo sensor array,
a scientist named Bryce Bayer
invented, and swiftly patented, the Bayer filter.
A recursive pattern that dedicates half the sensors to green,
and splits the other half between red and blue.
Why bother imitating reality, when you can simply imitate
an ape's perception of reality at one third of the cost?
A version of the Bayer filter is present in every camera using a CMOS chip,
from the phone in your pocket, to the Red Epic stereo rigs that filmed all four hundred and seventy four
excruciating minutes of The Hobbit trilogy.
Each gives us a decent red, channel and abysmally noisy blue channel,
and a crisp clean green channel with effectively double the resolution
Making green the obvious choice for chroma key work.
And by choice I of course mean the illusion of choice,
spread like wispy strands of a fragile web of free will,
pathetically cocooning our ape brains until they die.
Followed closely by the heat death of the universe.
Stop it. Stop it! Stop this!!! Stop it! What is that?
*panting* I'm trying to have a party here
Hey, I know, let's check out some green screen fails, huh?
Because it doesn't matter how good the tools are, YouTubers are gonna find a way to
*explicit* it up.
Let's check 'em out, and we don't have to go far.
How about these guys, huh?
They tried to fool me on their podcast with their little stunt, but you didn't fool me,
did you, Ethan? Hila? I knew!
And so did everyone else in the livestream in the first five seconds!
Maybe because the little fat borderlines like that one. You know why those happen? Do you?
It's because as--as-a-a-a-a--
as brilliant as the bear pattern is, it is after all a pattern,
it needs to be demosaiced, or 'debayered,' to look like a normal image.
Now, simple interpolation, where RGB values of neighboring pixels
are averaged to fill in the missing information,
works fine.
...for solid colors and smooth gradients, but across hard edges can introduce
artifacts. And these,
are green-screen killers.
When the shortest path between two complementary colors is gray,
it may look natural in context.
But take one of the colors away, and you're left with a big fat
glaring edge.
And then video compression comes along, and knackers things up even further.
The solution of course is an algorithm
that attempts to make decisions about where to interpolate, and where not to.
And while designing better algorithms is best left to the camera manufacturers,
we content creators have our own set of tricks, whether using softer lighting,
wider dynamic range cameras, or filling our scenes with less saturated colors that we can enhance after keying.
You might even realize my trademark red shirt is in fact,
light pink.
[Out of character] One take! Haha!
Okay, whatever's causing that is seriously uncool! *panting*
I tell you what is cool though. I was at a party in a friend's yacht last night,
and there was this girl
she was so f--oh my God look at this friggin guy!
Look at that green screen!
He's supposed to be this CGI guru, right?
so how come his matte edges look like he's been cut out of a page of teen magazine
with safety scissors?
And his hands constantly crashing into the edge of frame.
Dude, what did you even key this for?
Just keep it as picture in picture!
And the ginormous background shadow?
You know he can get rid of that procedurally, right?
I mean it all comes down to--oh no! Not aga-a-ain!
If we're tasked with keying something on green screen,
like this fluffy bunny,
[Jazzy background music] our natural inclination is to adjust all of the effects parameters until it looks right,
until we've achieved an optimal result.
But what if the green screen itself is lit sub-optimally?
What if no combination of sliders and knobs gives us the perfect key?
Are we doomed to brute-force our way with garbage masks and rotoscoping?
Well, not necessarily.
19th century British educational writer, William Edward Hickson, is credited with popularizing the proverb,
'If at first you don't succeed, try try again.'
And I'll try to use that here as a loose dot connect to the idea that we are in fact allowed
to use the chroma key effect more than once.
This opens up interesting possibilities.
We can dedicate the first instance of the effect to broadly cut away all parts of the background
that must be transparent, and fill all parts of the foreground that must be opaque.
Then, inflate the border. This way, a second instance of the effect no longer needs to
deal with the image as a whole.
We've limited its influence to the area immediately around the edge,
so we're free to adjust its settings more finely.
And if that doesn't do it, we can keep adding iterations, until it's perfect.
This iterative approach works for more than just green screen.
We see it in art, in construction, and education.
The very orbits of celestial bodies are iterations of freefall.
[Uplifting music] As is the wave-like behavior of electrons and atoms that make up all matter in the universe
In a very real way,
We are
the green screen.
Why shouldn't we be able to key anything we want?
*crying*
Why does this keep happening?
Why you guys so curious?
I just want to fool around and make you laugh.
Can't we all just relax and have fun? I just I want to show yo--
I wa--I wa--
Wanna sh--No. No!
I want--I wanna--
I want to show you guys something I figured out about my green screen.
See I've been using it forever, and it's working fine, but to be honest,
it just--it wasn't very green.
So I decided to measure just how green it is with a tool called a Vectorscope,
which maps a video signal's hues and saturation along two axes.
Now that eight o'clock square right there is where the
ideal colored green is supposed to live.
And you can see it's not pointing there. It's skewing towards cyan!
This just about did my head in. I couldn't understand it.
My lights are properly tungsten-balanced, and so is my camera.
What's going on?
So just for kicks, I switched the camera's white balance to daylight, to 56 Kelvins.
And bam, just like that, it pointed straight to the green vector
Great, but now I've got another problem: my foreground is gonna look all orange!
I'm filming tungsten light on a daylight setting,
so now I have to light it with a separate set of
Daylight balance lights. Which makes sense if you think about it.
you're supposed to have separation between your background, and foreground on green screen.
And basically the manufacturers of this one found a genius way to make sure you do it.
Something just clicked in my head when I realized that.
Luckily, I had my high-speed camera rolling and we captured the moment:
[CC note: this is a beautiful sound]
Now I may be just a simple rocket engineer,
but this inanimate object was able to teach me something,
to make me smarter yet again.
[Glitch sounds]
*crying*
Maybe this is not so bad.
Maybe the YouTube educational space is the place to be.
Maybe all good entertainment contains a little bit of truth,
and little bit of wisdom.
Maybe that's the kind of content that can ultimately...
Dare, I say it...
Change the world!
No, no!
[Anxiously] I'm commercially viable. Listen, follow me on Instagram and on Twitter.
Like my page on Facebook.
Snapchat!
I totally understand how it works, and I am on there all the time!
One important thing I want to ask you to do that no one has ever asked you before:
become my patron on Patreon.
I have seven reward tiers, and I can barely keep up.
And of course, badger your parents until they,
say it with me,
Buy. That. Merch!
And don't forget my new hit single, Troll Face Girl drops tomorrow!
[Singing] Troll face girl... (owawaooo...)
Your body makes me do things, I never
thought I'd do. For a troll face girl... (owawaooo...)
[Music]
[Outtake] As a piece of waste fell into the water beneath-- *chuckles* him
[Editing] How about instead we make movies using digital technology?
[Outtake] Because as prudent--
*sigh* God. I have such an itch.
[Outtake] With the image as a whole. We've limited its influence to... ssssomething something.
[Outtake] I want to show you guys something that figured out about my caree.. I cannot talk
[Unfortunately, the release of Captain D's new hit single, Troll Face Girl, will not be released in the near future]
[In response to negative press about this new release, Amelik Entertainment, LLC, will not premiere it]
[We thank you for staying loyal to the Captain Disillusion brand, and we hope you stay with us going forward]
[Subtitles by SWinxyTheCat]